The Research On The Application Of Schema Theory To Teaching English Writing In Senior High Schools

As an important form for expression of students’ ideas and communication, the practicality and importance of writing are obvious. According to “English Teaching Curriculum for High School Students”, the aims of teaching English writing include expressing facts, ideas, emotions and imaginations; exchanging information and cultivating standardized writing habits. Moreover, it also makes criteria and comments on contents, effects of language use, construction and coherence, format and register and target audience. As a result, how to improve students’ writing skills has always been a hot topic for English teachers as well as a headache for both teachers and students due to various reasons from teaching and examination.Schema theory aims to activate the previous knowledge in learners’ mind and helps them absorb and use new knowledge. Thus, using schema theory reasonably in English teaching can fully motivate students to make the new information understood and absorbed more easily in order to be integrated into the previous schema and form a new one, which can enrich the schema and improve students’ learning ability. So far the study and application of schema theory in English writing is not adequate. Therefore, this dissertation attempts to combine it with the teaching of English writing in Senior Three, based on the College Entrance Examination in Jiangsu Province to study how to use schema strategies to achieve effective teaching of English writing.The study is carried out on the basis of documents and experiments. First, the author gathers the knowledge about the current study and future trend of schema theory and the teaching of English writing from the printed and digital information in the library,. Second, the author combines the experience and problems in teaching to explore how to use schema theory to instruct English writing. Then, schema-oriented writing strategies are adopted in the experimental class while traditional methods are applied in the control class and the results are compared and analyzed after one semester. At last the author draw the conclusion that applying the schema theory to the teaching of English writing can help students improve their language use, enrich their essay contents and master the genres for different writing purposes.