Constructing College Listening Comprehension Schemas In Spoken English Class Teaching

As the development of our economy and the ever-increasing cross-cultural communication, the requirements of people's mastery of foreign language also have increased dramatically. Listening comprehension is always one of the most difficult parts in English learning though language skills are drawn special attention nowadays. Whereas, traditional listening comprehension teaching is by no means satisfactory since traditional way of listening comprehension teaching always focuses on the explanation of new words and grammatical structures. Under this circumstance, listeners are usually passive information receivers. Consequently, traditional way of teaching is not very efficient in improving listeners'listening skills as well as their comprehension abilities. Concerning the existing situation of current listening comprehension teaching as well as the low listening comprehension capacities of foreign language learners, it is high time that researches and reforms in listening comprehension teaching were required.In recent years, researches about listening comprehension directed by schema theory become more often. According to schema theory, one's background knowledge plays an important role in listening comprehension process. It is believed that the process is a combination of a listener's language knowledge, background knowledge and information from outside. And whether a listener can understand what he has heard or not largely depends on the activation of his background knowledge. Therefore, it is obvious that schema theory is vital important in listening comprehension process. However, the past researches, more often than not, focused on the schema's influence and their actuation. Few people proposed how to build the schemas systematically we need in listening comprehension, especially by combing the spoken English teaching with listening comprehension.This thesis proposed to combine the spoken English teaching with listening comprehension during the process of schemas building from the schematic perspective by giving out questionnaires to students to find out the problems they face during listening process and eventually this proposal also was verified by the experimental research carried out by the author during 36 weeks teaching period. In order to testify the feasibility and effectiveness of applying this proposal , an experiment was carried out.70 second-year non—English majors of Yanshan University as the subjects involve in an 36week project.They are divided into two groups:experimental class and control class.The experimental class received training involved schemata theory, and the control class received conventional instruction. After the training,the students of experimental class turn out to be more effective in listening than before,and they outperformed than those of control class.Finally, the listening test of CET4 of the two classes also checked the effect of the experiment.The result of the experimental test and statistical analysis verified that the approach of building listening comprehension schemas through spoken English class teaching is capable of enriching students'background knowledge and accordingly enhancing their listening comprehension ability.