| According to English Curriculum Standard(2011), junior middle school graduates should know 1500~1600 words and 200~300 idioms or collocations. The students’ vocabulary size affects the speed and efficiency of their English learning. Schema theory aims to activate people’s new knowledge by recalling their previous knowledge then build a bridge between them, by which learners can get and grasp the new knowledge effectively. From early 1980 s, with the development of schema theory, researchers began to pay more attention to the relationship between schema theory and language teaching and gained abundant achievements especially in reading and listening. On the contrary, the researches about schema theory and vocabulary teaching started relatively late. In recent years, some researchers have applied schema theory to vocabulary teaching in college and gained some positive results. But the related researches focusing on primary English learners are comparatively few. The essential vocabulary is the guarantee of promoting students’ vocabulary knowledge and developing their language skills in junior middle school. This study intends to explore the feasibility of applying schema theory to vocabulary teaching in junior middle school.The present study adopts schema theory as the theoretical foundation and takes vocabulary teaching in junior middle school as the research topic. It combines the schema theory with vocabulary teaching and offers a new perspective of vocabulary teaching in junior middle school. The current study chose 170 students from two classes of Grade 8 as the subject—a series of schema-based vocabulary teaching methods are adopted in the experimental class(EC), and the traditional vocabulary teaching methods are adopted in the controlled class(CC). The teaching experiment lasts 18 weeks and tries to use the quantitative analysis to explore the following research questions:(1) What techniques does schema-based vocabulary teaching offer to help students to memorize new words?(2) What effects does schema-based vocabulary teaching have on students’ vocabulary learning?All the data in this paper comes from the pre-test, post-test and the questionnaire of the students whom the author taught in a junior middle school. Then the collected data is analyzed by statistics SPSS 19.0.According to this experiment, schema theory shows better effects on English vocabulary teaching. Students tend to accept schema-based vocabulary teaching methods to memorize English words and actively apply the words to daily use. As to the implications about vocabulary teaching, the teachers should guide the students to build a bridge between the new and the previous knowledge by schema and help them memorize vocabulary more effectively. |
