A Study Of Teaching Design Of Spoken English In Senior High School From The Perspective Of Schema Theory

English learning consists of four basic skills which are listening, speaking, reading and writing. In foreign language teaching, the four basic skills have been greatly improved on the part of Chinese senior high school students in the past decades. However, speaking is still the most difficult skill for the majority of senior high school students. In the history of English teaching in China, we have not attached much importance to English speaking. So the result of English speaking is not satisfying. For English teachers, speaking teaching has been perplexing them for a long time. And for English learners in Senior High School, the teaching of speaking in the English class in China is supposed to be the most difficult course. Oral exam is not compulsorily demanded for National College Entrance Examination in many provinces and regions in China. Affected by the examination-oriented education for a long time, teachers and students in our country have not reached a thorough understanding of the strategic importance of spoken English teaching and learning. In addition, lack of theoretical guidance on spoken English teaching and time arrangement for English teachers caused low efficiency in teaching spoken English. The fact that students have difficulties and barriers in oral expression is caused by just focusing attention on the word and sentence teaching in spoken language teaching in senior high schools, ignoring the oral discourse production and oral discourse understanding.In spite of this, the application of schema theory in college spoken English teaching can provide more convenience for and have good learning effects on learners. Schema theory contains a powerful explanation ability and generalization ability which makes it widely used in the field of foreign language teaching, and researches on this field enrich the theories of foreign language teaching.According to schema theory, a schema is an active organization of past reactions or past experiences. Language comprehension depends largely on learners’ background knowledge. Therefore, schema theory plays an important role in information activation and spoken English output. The schema theory considers that any language material has no meaning itself. It only guides the speakers to form the meanings according to their previous knowledge. Schema, characterized of its systematic, dynamic and comprehensive features, would be strengthened with the knowledge constantly acquired by speakers. The variety of the schema and the rationality of its structure would play and defining role to improve their speaking ability effectively. Students at high school have accumulated some knowledge schema, which ordinarily remain dormant and are stored in students’ long-term memory. When speaking of English, the dormant schema related to the topic in students’ minds need to be activated by stimulus. Schema now go into working memory being contents of which currently is thinking. And these contents being activated will activate other contents related to prior contents as joint contents. As a result all the schema net webs concerning joint contents go into work memory again.In view of the above situation, and on the basis of schema theory as well as speaking theory, this study attempts to apply schema theory to the teaching of spoken English, aiming to improve students’ oral output by helping them to construct linguistic, formal and content schemata besides learning grammatically correct sentences by heart. Some pedagogical implications for the teaching of spoken English are drawn from the research. To ensure the students better performance in a speaking task, the teachers should emphasize the creation, modification and activation of the students’ schemata of different categories. Efficient ways should be adopted so that the students’ speaking ability can be improved, such as stressing pre-speaking preparations, designing proper and practical activities, enlarging the students’ vocabulary and encouraging students’ extensive reading and listening. Hopefully, this study will cast light on the teaching of spoken English in the senior high schools of China.