The Application Of Schema Theory In College English Vocabulary Teaching

Vocabulary, as one of the most important constitute of the language, its function allowsof no doubt in foreign language teaching. However, the importance of the vocabularyteaching has never been laid emphasis on in the practice of the English teaching. At the sametime, vocabulary memorizing has been a big problem that brings trouble to the students.Therefore, the effectiveness of the vocabulary teaching is closely related to the realization ofthe foreign language teaching’s purpose.The function of the traditional vocabulary teaching is not obvious in helping the studentslearn the vocabulary and memorize the vocabulary, so it is very urgent and important for thestudents to find new and more proper methods to learn the vocabulary.The most important function of the schema theory is to put the disorganized knowledgein our minds into our brains with organization according to a certain category. Based on thefunction of the schema theory, schema-based teaching methods can activate the students’interests and improve the learning efficiency, so they have been widely applied in every fieldsof foreign language teaching. The thesis explores how to apply the schema-based teachingmethods into the English vocabulary teaching from cognitive perspective and encourage thestudents build up schemata by using their original knowledge and schema networks and tocontinue to activate the schema in the study, so as to promote the students’ vocabularyLearningWith the guidance of the schema theory and100non-English majors in SuihuaUniversity as the study subject, twelve weeks has been spent on the experimental study aboutthe schema construction, activation and application, and the time is also used to study theways of guiding the students to understand and master the schema-based vocabulary learningmethodsA questionnaire survey was conducted before the study, the vocabulary memorystrategies of the students were known through the investigation. After the questionnaire, therewas the pre-test which was conducted to know the fact that whether the levels between theexperimental class and the control class are similar or not, and after the experiment, thepost-test would came and the data would be collected and analyzed by using the statisticalsoftware-SPSS17.0,finally a conclusion was arrived at: the methods based on schema theorycan help students to learn more new words and consolidate old words, so its role can not be ignored in the English vocabulary teaching in the university. Therefore, the research hascertain practical significance.