A Study On The Effectiveness Of Schema Theory In College English Writing Teaching In The Context Of CALL

How to improve students'English writing competence is one of the most important tasks for English teachers in China. Many college non-English majors can not write satisfying English essays, though they have spent years in learning English. Many teachers have contributed a lot in studying students'English essays adopting schema theory; however, many studies focus on words, sentences or the negative transfer of mother language, instead of centering on the overall texts including linguistics, content and structure. And a majority of studies are conducted in the traditional English writing teaching situation. With the development of computer and internet, the application of computer in English teaching is popular. However, few empirical studies have been conducted on English writing teaching in the context of CALL adopting schema theory. In order to fill this gap, the author applies schema theory in English writing teaching in the context of CALL aiming to improve students'writing competence.From the analysis of characteristics and functions of schemata, the author chooses some useful elements to guide the writing teaching and designed a schema theory-oriented teaching method. It includes the activating of previous schemata, constructing new schemata, and consolidating schemata in different writing phases. In activating schemata period, the author uses PowerPoint to analyze the structure, genre and cultural background knowledge of model essays. Besides, the author adopts semantic maps to enlarge students'vocabulary. And students are required to search relevant materials about the theme of the title online. In constructing schema period, the author shows students some materials about the topic by PowerPoint, while students discuss with others to gather some useful ideas through brainstorming. And students compose the essays in class and correct them by themselves and their peers. And then, students hand in the essays through emails to the teacher after class. In consolidating schemata period, the teacher emails the feedback to students and chooses two samples for whole-class correction. This is the general procedure of the teaching method.The empirical study is conducted to check the effectiveness of the schema theory-oriented instruction assisted by computer in the teaching of college English writing. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses are adopted in analyzing the results of the experiment. The subjects involving in the research are 168 non-English majors in Zhengzhou University,84 in experimental class and 84 in the controlled. At the beginning of the semester, the questionnaire and the pre-test are conducted to check students'current proficiency in writing and to find out what kinds of problems existing in pre-test. And within the span of about 3.5 months in the experiment, a series of writing teaching strategies and activities are adopted in order to activate student's schemata, to build up new schemata and to consolidate the schemata. In the end of the experiment, the author adopts a post-test to check whether there are significant differences of the experimental class and the controlled class. After the experiment, the author makes the independent samples tests for organization, linguistic and content of the pre-test and post-test essays for the experimental class and the controlled class with the help of SPSS11.5. And the results show that there are significant differences between these two classes, that is, students in the experimental class are much better than students in the controlled class in writing. Besides, the author makes paired samples test of pre-test and post-test for the experimental class to see the differences of pre-test and post-test of the experimental class. The paired samples tests show that there is significant difference of the experimental class in the pre-test and post-test, that is, students gain much high scores in the post-test than in the pre-test.Research findings tell that schema-oriented instruction assisted by computers is effective and systematic in improving students'writing proficiency in organization linguistics and content. It can build up and enrich students'schemata, draw their attention to differences of different kinds of schemata in writing process and increase students'learning autonomy in English writing in and out of class.Due to the time limit and other restrictions in the experiment, this research has some limitations. It is recommended that people interested in this field should conduct further research in future.