Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Research background and significance of the study

As one of the international and a significant communicative tool, obviously, English iswidely used in a large number of fields with the rapid development of the internationalcommunication and globalization; nowadays, it is becoming more important andindispensable with the ascending status of China all over the world.As Xiao Jianzhuang (1997) put it, “English writing has a very high practical value.”As Swain(1995) put it, “writing helps learners test the syntactic structure of the target andthe use of the vocabulary, promote the automation of language use, and effectively achievethe aim of language acquisition.” Students internalize the knowledge of language features,generic structure and develop the English writing skills.Writing is a complex process of language communication and is also a creativethinking process. However, writing is said to be the weakest point among the four basicskills: listening, speaking, reading and writing in China. Hence, there seems to be the mostdifficult for students to complete an English article and hard for teachers to teach Englishwriting.Writing is such a dynamic process that the students need to use complex brainoperations to make decision on choices, opinions, structural options and organization ofinformation. In order to explore such difficult inner working in a writer's mind, a largenumber of studies have been researched.

………….

1.2 Purpose of the study

Whether schema theory can be applied to English teaching is explored by manyresearchers. They have researched many methods on schema theory applied to listeningand reading, but just a few about writing. This is such a wide topic that the author can notcover it completely. But current views on writing and schema theory will be discussed. Atthe same time, how schemata influences English writing and how schema theory applied toEnglish writing are also discussed.In the past years, English writing teaching approaches have been improved. Thechange between traditional product-oriented method and present process-oriented methodhas been the most significant one. The increasing development of schema theory has beenimproved by the changes in the 1970s and 1980s. Schemata is used to help middle schoolstudents get more knowledge about schema theory and activate the schemata about theirideas, thus a useful method is found to teach English writing.Questionnaire, test and interview are used in this paper. The data will be gained andanalyzed. Evidence will be found through the data to demonstrate the influence of schematheory applied to English writing. After analyzing and discussing the experiment, aneffective teaching approach of English writing is explored to answer the following researchquestions:Can Schema theory promote the students’ interest in English writing?Is it effective to adopt schemata approach to enhance students’ writing ability?Can Schema theory improve students’ writing strategies?

………..

Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Schema Theory

A schema (plural schemata or schemas) is an organized, general knowledge aboutsituations and individuals that has been abstracted from prior experiences and stored inlong term memory. It is a hypothetical mental structure for representing generic conceptsstored in memory and a generalized mental model used to organize memory, to focusattention, to interpret experience, and to codify actions. It is a model of the world thatpeople use to remember and make sense of things in an organized unit of knowledge thatembodies typical expectation of situations, events, and people. (Chang, 2005: 37) In the 18th century, the physiologist Henry Head (1920) and the cognitivepsychologist Frederick Bartlett (1932) mentioned the original concept of schema theory. In1781, the cognitive concept of schema was put forward by a philosopher from Germanynamed Immanuel Kant, who disputed that the concepts only had meaning which referred tothe knowledge. He considered that the concept of the schema theory had no meaning.However, it could connect with the acquired knowledge in order to produce the meaning.The concept of schema was also introduced to psychology by a psychologist named F. C.Bartlett from England. The term "schema" or "schemata" related to the element in theorganization of preferential knowledge. In his book "Remembering" which came out in1932, how to use schemata as a way of remembering in people's mind was also introducedby him. Evidence was found that memory and understanding were expected to be shapedin order to form the basis of people's prior knowledge. Therefore, schema has motivationof passing experience and reactions to be constructed. From Bartlett's opinion, more andmore researchers made great contributions to develop schema's concepts.

…………

2.2 Researches on English writing teaching

Different notion and concepts in the research reflects the different approaches andfocuses on the nature of writing. From a large amount of literature review, we can find outthat researchers and scholars try to explain the nature of writing from various perspectives.Some scholars, such as Lu & Ma, 2010; Wang & Li, 2006; Wan & Wu, 2006; etc. try toanalyze the error in English writing while others like Liu, 2007; Wang & Wen, 2002; etctake efforts to study the characteristics of English sentence patterns written by Chinesestudents. Zhao Qian (2007) focuses on the syllabus design of writing course in theuniversity Zhao, 2010; Zhang, 2006; etc. try to dwell on English writing teaching. In spiteof the various approaches in the research, they are all proved to be useful to help studentshave a better understanding of writing process so as to improve their writing skills.English writing is really hard to teach, so both teachers and researchers have triedmany different methods to improve students' writing skills. Then three major approacheshave been established in English writing: product-based approach, process-based approachand genre-based approach. These three approaches will be introduced in the next section.

…………

Chapter Three Research Methodology.... 18

3.1 Research questions ....... 18

3.2 Subjects ...... 18

3.3 Instruments ....... 18

3.4 Experimental Procedures.... 20

3.4.1 Teaching procedure ........ 20

3.4.2 Teaching in EC ......... 23

3.4.3Teaching in CC.... 26

3.5 Post-test ...... 27

Chapter Four Data Collection and Discussion ......... 28

4.1 Analysis and Discussion of questionnaire........ 28

4.2 Analysis and discussion of the tests ..... 30

4.3 Analysis and discussion of interview ......... 35

Chapter Five Conclusion......... 37

5.1 Major findings ........ 37

5.2 Implications of this research..... 38

5.3 Limitations of this research ...... 39

5.4 Suggestions....... 40

Chapter Four Data Collection and Discussion

4.1 Analysis and Discussion of questionnaire

Students in experimental class answer the questionnaire before and after theexperiment, and then, paired sample t-tests are made by SPSS 11.5 and the results arepresented as follows: From the table above, we can see the students’ changes before and after theexperiment. The mean score is 14.03 at the beginning of the semester, however, it grows to15.60 after the experiment, which shows that the students become much more interested inEnglish writing than before and alter their attitudes towards English. Data in Table 7 show the results of the pre-test. The mean score of the experimentalclass is 8.2250 while that of the control class is 8.1750. Then the study adopts theindependent sample t-test which is responsible for comparing the difference based on themean score.In table 8, the Sig. in Levene’s Test for equality of variances is .212 which is higherthan 0.05. Then it should check the score of Sig(2-tailed), t and degree of freedom in theEquality variances assumed conditions. The scores are respectively .335, .970 and 78.Therefore, there is no significant difference as to the mean scores of the two groups.Table 7 and table 8 show that students in the two classes have no significantdifference in their writing before the experiment. Naturally, it is rational to choose the 80students as the subjects.

………..

Conclusion

Through the experiments and discussion above, it is easy for us to find that theschema theory plays an active role in the process of English writing. Under the guidance ofthe schema theory, the teaching of English in the middle school can make the teaching ofwriting more effective, and make writing forms more flexible and learning much easier.In the previous chapters, the author reviews the concept of schema theory and itstypes. And analyzes the same theoretical theory, illustrates current writing approaches inhome and abroad. And the current English writing teaching approaches used in china arenot so effective in enhancing students’ writing ability. Hence, the researcher introduces anew writing approach，schema-based approach, which can make the teaching of Englishwriting more effective.The thesis is devoted to find out the effectiveness of the schema-based approach toenhance the writing ability for middle school students. To prove the schema-basedapproach is effective, the author does questionnaire research, experimental training andinterview, then analyze and discuss the data collected from the experiment.

…………

Reference (omitted)