The Application Of Schema Theory To The Teaching Of English Writing In Middle School

In recent years, schema theory receives widely application in the English listening andreading instruction, while the studies are relatively fewer on writing instruction, much lessfor middle school students. Some related studies illustrate that writing is considered as theweakest point for Chinese students among the four basic skills such as listening, speaking,reading and writing. This paper focuses on the application of the schema theory to middleschool students’ English writing in order to use schema theory to discover an effectivemethod or approach to improve students’ writing ability. In order to improve students’abilities of composing different ingredients of a composition and more than clearly expresstheir ideas, an experimental research of schema theory teaching in junior English writingwas conducted. The paper finally concludes that schema theory teaching is effective inEnglish writing.First of all, the author reviews the concept of schema theory and the classifications ofschemata, and then introduces current research trends of schema theory to English writingabroad and in China. Schema theory is also analyzed and evaluated in order to find theconnection of schema theory with English writing teaching. In this thesis, the writer tries toanswer the following questions through the experiment, questionnaire and interview:Can Schema theory promote the students’ interest in English writing?Is it effective to adopt schemata approach to enhance students’ writing ability?Can Schema theory improve students’ writing strategies?This thesis adapts the quantitative and qualitative analysis in terms of questionnaires,pre-tests, post-tests and interview. The experiment was carried out in two classes atparalleled level in Zhengzhou76thMiddle School. The application of schema theory whichlasted for four months has been conducted in the experimental class, while the controlledclass still uses the traditional method. The data collected from the experiment has beencalculated by SPSS11.5. For EC, in the pre-test M=8.7250, in the post-test M=9.4250.Theaverage score in post-test is1.25points higher than that of the pre-test. From table13,Sig(2-tailed)=.000<0.05, there is significant difference between pre-test and post-test inEC. The EC has greater improvement after four-month study. For CC, In table13,Sig(2-tailed)=0.165>0.05. There is no significant difference between pre-test and post-testin CC. The CC almost has no progress under the traditional teaching approach. It provedthat the writing proficiency of the experimental class has improved much more than the controlled class, which testifies the feasibility and effectiveness of the application ofschema theory to English writing classroom.