Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Background of the study
Writing is an important language skill. Hyland (2017: 14) describes theimportance of writing: “writing is central to our personal experience and socialidentities, and we are often evaluated by our control of it.” It is the writing skill thatcan consolidate and strengthen what learners have learnt, such as vocabularies,grammars, and textual knowledge.However, the current situation of college English writing is not optimistic. Onthe one hand, current situation of college students’ English writing is not optimistic.According to Zhang Xuemei (2017), there are some shortcomings mainly includingthree aspects in non-English-majors’ compositions. From the aspect of choosingwords and constructing sentences, most students can’t use words appropriately andflexibly, having much grammar mistakes in compositions. From the aspect of content,they can’t express the idea so clearly that their compositions’ structure is poorlyorganized. From the aspect of structure, they lack coherence and logic in their Englishwriting compositions. Besides, college students would like to use Chinese thinkingpatterns to write English compositions. Consequently, their compositions are notidiomatic and there are many wrongly-used words as well as grammar errors in theircompositions. On the other hand, current situation of college English writing teachingis also not optimistic. Zhu Yu (2017: 25) believes that not only comprehensible inputis not enough, but also time spent on writing course is not enough. In addition, contentof textbooks is separated from practical language use (Zhu Yu, 2017: 25). As a result,learners’ writing skill is, to some extent, neglected and developed ineffectively.
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1.2 Significance of the study
Using foreign language, particularly English, to write argumentative essays orother kinds of articles is an essential skill for every college student. Therefore,English writing is of great importance. However, as discussed above, there are many problems in college English students’ compositions and several gaps of previousresearches. Thus, the present study tries to solve the problems and fill the gaps. Thisstudy applies schema and corpus into English writing teaching. Based on schematheory, input hypothesis theory, and DDL theory, the author designs a new teachingapproach which is the schema approach assisted by the COCA and the CEAWSE. Thepurpose of the present study is, as is stated in the College English CurriculumRequirements (2017), “to develop students’ ability to use English in a well-roundedway and to enhance their writing skill and the ability to study independently”.Traditional teaching mode is “present, practice and produce”. This mode is akind of stimulus and response. The new teaching approach focuses on the importanceof using authentic materials in teaching of writing and it views learners as languageobservers. Learners acquire language through analyzing the evidence of authenticlanguage, discovering the characteristics, and summarizing the rules. Application ofcorpus into the teaching of college English writing promotes the construction ofschema and the degree of language internalization. To some extent, the schemaapproach assisted by corpus is a kind of discovering learning. Through learning thenew teaching approach, learners can reap benefits from the new approach in terms ofthe aspects of content, organization, and language. The stud，英语论文，英语论文 |
