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

The application of schema theory aims at activating the existing knowledge in learners' minds and helping them construct the new knowledge.The author takes the opportunity of teaching to discover the main problems of senior high school students in English writing by means of interview and observation,such as failing to express the idea,using the ambiguous structure,writing the compositions in Chinese thinking way.Based on that,the study attempts to apply linguistic schema,formal schema and cultural schema to English writing teaching in senior high school.The teaching procedures of the application of schema theory are presented in the thesis from three stages: activating the original schema,constructing the new schema and consolidating the acquired schema.With the help of schema theory,teachers organize various activities to activate the existing linguistic schema,construct the formal schema and enrich the cultural schema,so as to improve the students' English writing competence.This study demonstrates the effectiveness of schema theory in English writing teaching in senior high school through the teaching experiment.It consists of the following research questions:(1)What is the influence of the application of schema theory in English writing teaching on students' writing attitude?(2)What change does the application of schema theory in English writing teaching bring to students' English writing competence? The author takes the two parallel classes of Grade Two from Minquan No.1 Senior High School as the research subject for an academic year.One of them is chosen as the experimental class with the instruction of schema theory,while the other is the control class and it adopts the traditional writing teaching approach.Before the experiment,the author conducts a questionnaire to investigate the existing problems in students' writing.After the teaching experiment,a post-questionnaire is conducted in the experimental class to discover whether there is a change in students' attitude to English writing.In addition,the author collects the results of the pre-test and the post-test of the two classes.Software Statistical Package for Social Science(SPSS20.0)is used to analyze the experimental data.From the data analysis of the experiment,the conclusion can be made as follows:(1)The application of schema theory in English writing teaching influences the students' writing attitude,such as stimulating students' interest in writing,enhancing their confidence in writing,helping students collect materials more actively and developing their positive learning attitude.(2)The application of schema theory in English writing teaching can improve the students' English writing competence in many aspects: it expands the students' vocabulary and reduces the grammatical errors;the students' writing content is more abundant and the structure is more coherent;their English writing scores are improved.