A Study On Frame Theory-based Listening Teaching Model

Listening is an important aspect of the English language teaching and learning,which provides the base for the growth of reading, writing, and speaking abilities.Listening comprehension is an active process. In the process, the listener has to utilizebackground knowledge, contextual and linguistic clues to interpret what the speakermeans. However, the current situation of the teaching of college English listening inChina is still unsatisfactory. In college English listening class, the teaching of listeningis often characterized by explaining new words and grammatical knowledge. In thelistening process, it’s not efficient for students to improve their listening skill.In view of these kinds of problems, this thesis takes up the guidance of Frame theoryto the teaching of English listening as the research focus. In addition, the authorestablishes the Frame Theory based listening teaching model adapted from thethree-stage framework of listening teaching. Frames represent the knowledge andbeliefs pertaining to specific and frequently recurring situations. Frame theory holdsthe view that listeners’ frames in mind play a key role in understanding a new text.Therefore, in the pre-listening phase, the teaching focus is to activate or constructrelevant frames in students’ mind. In the while-listening phase, it is important todevelop students’ inferential ability by means of frames. Besides, teachers relate thetranscript to the relevant frame description so that students could evaluate their guess.And the work in the post-listening phase is to guide students to grasp the listeningmaterial on the whole, and to give more relative exercises. Finally, in order to examinethe feasibility of the proposed model, the author chose87students from HunanAgricultural University to do a comparative study. This experiment lasts for threemonths. A pre-test and a post-test are used to collect data. The collected data isanalyzed by SPSS16.0. It turns out that the new listening teaching model based onframe theory was more effective in improving students’ listening comprehensionability than the traditional one.