Based On The Schema Theory Of English Listening Teaching Model

Listening is a language skill that is most frequently used in daily life,and it is also the most important knowledge that people acquire during foreign language learning. Therefore, the teaching of listening as ESL has drawn attention of some educators. There are some clear requirements for teaching of listening in"China University English Syllabus"(Revised Edition). The Syllabus points out that the teachers should teach the students to make them have the listening skill and could communicate in English. However,the current teaching of college English listening in China is not satisfying. This kind of teaching is always very old, and there are also some shortages. In the traditional teaching mode of English listening, the teachers usually lack some certain teaching strategies. They just play the records without offering any information related to the learning materials. During the training of listening, listeners are only viewed as passive receivers without any suggestion and explanation of the background knowledge. They could not get the training of the listening skills,either. After the students listen one or more than one times, the teachers just begin to check the answers, and then play back the tape sentence by sentence. This kind of English listening instruction is far from developing students'competence of listening, and it also does not benefit to the improvement of the listening comprehension competence of the listeners. In view of the current status of the college English listening class, it is very necessary to reform the inefficient teaching methods and research and to explore a scientific and efficient mode of English listening instruction.To solve the problems mentioned above, the thesis takes up the guidance of schema theory to the teaching of listening as its topic to study. We develop a more efficient English listening teaching mode through the systemic instructional design and the practice of English listening teaching,that is the Schema Theory-based Teaching Mode of English Listening. This mode aims to improve reasonably and effectively the college English listening teaching and the students'listening competence. It is well known that listening is an active process. In the process of listening, what the listener wants to get is just an adequate understanding of what the speaker said. To attain this purpose, listeners should utilize the previously acquired knowledge and depend on many listening cognitive strategies. Active listeners will be good at taking advantage of the background knowledge and understand purposefully what the speaker said. Schema Theory holds the view that listeners'background knowledge plays a key role in understanding a new text. That is to say, a listener can understand a new text only when he utilizes previously acquired knowledge. The previously acquired knowledge is the listeners'background knowledge which includes all the knowledge the listener learned before, such as linguistic knowledge, social knowledge, cultural knowledge, common sense and so on. These previously acquired knowledge structures stored in the brain are schemata. According to schema theory, the listening process is a process in which listeners'previously acquired schemata interact with the input information. Whether listeners can understand new information depends to a large degree on how much background knowledge they have activated. Therefore,the Schema Theory is significant in guiding instruction of college English listening.The thesis reviews the current status of the college English listening instruction at first. In order to prove the necessity and methods of improving the mode of English listening instruction, it gives a detailed analysis of the present problems in listening teaching and summarizes the relevant researches. Then it gives a brief introduction of Schema Theory and listening teaching, and indicates the impact of schemata on listening comprehension. Based on this,the author designs a Schema Theory-based Teaching Mode of English Listening according to the instructional system design theory by Gagné. During the writing of this thesis, the author also organizes two pedagogical experiments. The thesis collects the data from the experiments to prove the effectiveness of the teaching mode. Based on the above experimental analysis and conclusion, the author proved that the Schema Theory-based Teaching Mode of English Listening is more efficient than the traditional ones in college English listening instruction.