The teacher’s use of pre-writing activities in building schemas for university students majoring in English

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to investigate the implementation of pre-writing activities as well as their effectiveness in building schemas for first-year students at the fast-track division of a university specialized in foreign languages. To reach the aim, the researcher employs case study as the research design with the combination of both qualitative and quantitative methods on one writing teacher and her 20 first-year English major students at the fast-track division. Data are collected from observations, interviews, sample analysis and questionnaires to explore the research questions from different angles. The results indicate that pre-writing is the stage that the teacher pays most attention to, and different writing genres require the focus on different types of schemas. Various pre-writing activities have been employed, in which some of the activities, such as model analyzing and journalistic question asking, are frequently utilized to build more than one type of schema. Besides, the opinions towards the effectiveness of the used pre-writing activities are generally consistent among the teacher and students. While the activities demonstrate high efficacy in constructing formal schemas, their impacts on linguistic and content schemas are not as impressive due to both internal and external constraints, which should be taken into consideration for more successful teaching and learning practice.