Date of Graduation

8-2018

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD)

Degree Level

Graduate

Department

English

Advisor/Mentor

Jolliffe, David A.

Committee Member

Dominguez Barajas, Elias

Second Committee Member

Kayi-Aydar, Hayriye

Keywords

Composition and Pedagogy; Rhetoric and Composition; Second Language Writing

Abstract

My research aims at exploring the contribution of various types of schemata to leaners’ text comprehension and text production, especially ESL (English as a Second Language) writing, to better understand how ESL learners, especially Vietnamese graduate students, use diverse resources in schema activation to facilitate their processes of learning to write in the academic setting. To better understand these processes, the researcher synthesized previous studies together with conducting interviews with four Vietnamese graduate students and analyzing their writing samples to investigate the relationships among types of schemata: formal, content, and rhetorical schemata, which can be significant in ESL writing and composition pedagogy. Formal schemata refer to learners’ awareness and competence in technically linguistic expressions; content schemata refer to learners’ knowledge of reading and writing topics; and rhetorical schemata refer learners’ awareness of the contextual situations in which texts are created. The analyses in this research have found a substantial contribution of the three types of schemata to the reading and writing processes. The analyses in my research can possibly provide a better understanding of schemata to facilitate ESL learners’ reading and writing competence.

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