A Study Of Formal Schema Effects On Chinese Senior 1 Students Achievement

This study is aimed to observe effects of formal schemata method on the achievement of Senior One students English learning in our school.In recent years, with the developmental research on background knowledge, a new theory named schematic theory has been established. Schema theory of reading says that reading is a communication between reader and text and also a combination of the prior knowledge stored in reader's brain and the new information conveyed by the text. Schemata are highly organized, generic knowledge structure composed of slots or placeholders for each component. Two broad types of schemata , which are used to research reading process, are content and formal schemata. Schemata theorists believe that in reading process, these two schemata interact with each other and lead to the comprehension of a text.The research of reading schema theory on language teaching focuses on the studies of content schemata, formal schemata and the combination of content and formal schemata. The study of content schemata emphasizes on different culture background knowledge. The formal schemata emphasizes on text structure (i.e. story and expository structures) . Prior researches on formal schemata begin with observing the evidence that formal schemata affect reading, and then with training studies on formal schema reading. Researchers carry out their studies regarding English as a native language or second language. Their research results have showed that teaching formal schemata can facilitate native English or English as second language reading. Encouraged by those prior positive results in the investigation of the formal schemata, I begin to carry out my experiment in my two classes.My study utilize three-step model to activate and use formal schemata when dealing with the texts in textbook. In experimental class, formal schemata teaching is held, and in control class, conventional teaching method is held. The specific operation of formal schemata method in experimental class is that, from the writing perspective, a teacher activates or introduces some background knowledge of text structure in pre-reading activity process; And in while-reading process a teacher helps students to look for the topic sentences in each paragraph and demonstrate the main ideas and the connection between them in the form of a diagram; in post-reading activities, instructs students to retell thetext with the help of the diagram or write something following the example of the text they've just learned.This research is held in the two Senior One classes (Class One and Class Two )of three in our school. I teach these two classes English. The experiment lasted four months from March to June in 2003 and the experiment conducted naturally (finish the same teaching materials , the students attended the school regular tests and the achievements were judged by the mean score of the two classes ) . From the experiment, we got the following result:Formal schemata method utilized in dealing with the text in class teaching have the positive influence on students achievements.