Application Of Schema Theory To College English Writing Teaching

Based on the previous studies, the research in the present thesis attempts to investigate the effectiveness of schema-oriented writing teaching approach aiming at improving the students'writing ability and arousing their interests in writing. The author conducted an empirical study on the application of schema theory in college English writing teaching, and raises three research questions, namely, (1) whether schema theory exerts influence on the development of students'writing ability; (2) the degree of this influence from different perspectives; (3) the possible methods of adopting schema theory in college English writing teaching—ways to help students accumulate, construct and activate their schemata. During the study, both qualitative and quantitative methods are adopted. A questionnaire which collects information about the current situation of English writing learning and teaching in college was applied. The purpose of this questionnaire is to arrange proper teaching methods in the experiment in order to achieve better and more significant effects. After acquiring the data, the author analyzes them through SPSS, including means comparison and independent-sample's t test.Through analyzing the data obtained from the experiment and summarizing the interview results, the author obtains some significant findings:(1) Schema plays a vital role in the improvement of the students'writing ability;(2) For average students, the improvement of formal schema through this teaching approach is comparatively easy. The effect of schema theory on the development of content is relatively less significant. To improve the vocabulary use, the students have to be more competent in English language manipulating. Also longer time is needed to organize the newly gained words into proper structure in order to better employ them in the composition.(3) In constructing new schema, reading is proved to be more helpful. Group discussion or communication is relatively more effective in activating students'existing schemata, but the difference of the effects of these two methods from these two perspectives is not so obvious.