An Empirical Research on Schema Theory Based Teaching of the Continuation Task for Chinese Senior High School Students

Abstract

The continuation task, a novel type of source-based writing task which requires students to read and accomplish an unfinished source text, has gained growing popularity in English writing tests, particularly in China. This study employed schema theory in the teaching of senior high school continuation tasks and delved into its resultant effects on learners’ overall writing ability, lexical richness, syntactic complexity, and semantic coherence. Theoretically, it serves as an extension of the Schema theory, Practically, it contributes to the improvement of the continuation task instruction and offers a realistic method to achieving better writing from the perspectives of linguistic schema, content schema, and formal schema. This research revolves around such questions: What effects do schema theory-based Continuation task instructions have on students’ overall writing competence; lexical richness; syntactic complexity and semantic coherence? During the research, two groups of EFL students (N=110) from Chinese senior high schools participated in the trial for fourteen weeks. One group was randomly selected as Control Class where the teacher adopted traditional teaching approaches. At the same time, the other was set up as the Experimental Class guided by schema theory. The participants writing performance were evaluated through the lexical richness, syntactic complexity and semantic coherence. Sample T-test and paired T-test found statistically significant differences between the Control class and the Experimental class. These findings suggest that the schema theory-based approach, such as providing a semantic map or outlining the story to participants, was proven effective in honing the students’ overall writing capability, lexical richness, syntactic complexity, and semantic coherence. Because of the chosen research approach, its efficacy is limited concerning language and discourse.