Application Of Schema Theory To English Listening Teaching

Listening skill is one of the four significant language skills(listening,speaking,reading and writing).English listening,as a form of language input,plays an important role in English learning.English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2011 edition)has put forward requirements of English listening teaching.After listening classes,students should be able to understand the speaker’s intention according to his or her intonation and stress,extract information and opinions in conversations and passages,get over the barrier of new words to understand the main idea through the context,take notes of simple information,etc.Therefore,it is necessary for teachers to help students understand materials by teaching them a variety of listening strategies and skills.However,by observation in everyday teaching practice,the author finds out that,many teachers don’t pay enough attention to English listening teaching.They find listening difficult to control and just consider it a passive process for students to receive information.In traditional English listening classes,teachers frequently lack awareness of developing students’ good listening habits and strategies.Usually,without helping students activate their schema,that is,the related background knowledge about the current listening material,teachers often play the recording one or two times,and then begin to check the answers and replay the recording sentence by sentence for students to repeat.Also,there is no activity as a form of output to help students consolidate what have been learned.As a matter of fact,teachers are just testing students rather than teaching them how to listen,which makes students lose interest and confidence and undoubtedly leads to unsatisfactory listening competence.Therefore,it is of great necessity and significance to explore a scientific and efficient model of English listening teaching.With plenty of former researchers mainly applying schema theory to English reading teaching and to English listening teaching in high school or college and achieving some success,the purpose of the research is to fill in the research blank and investigate the effects of applying schema theory to English listening teaching in junior middle school.First,the author made a survey of the current situation of English listening teaching in Rongxian Junior Middle School,and then discussed what effects schema theory has on English listening teaching,and finally the author put forward feasible measures teachers can take to improve listening teaching effects.In order to seek answers and solutions,with Vygotsky’s zone of proximaldevelopment and Krashen’s input hypothesis as supportive theories,the author employed an experimental research in Rongxian Junior Middle School based on schema theory.The research has adopted both qualitative and quantitative research methods.The qualitative research mainly refers to the literature review about schema as well as related studies of English listening teaching based on schema theory in both foreign countries and in China,while the quantitative research means the author used research instruments—questionnaires,tests and interview to collect data and analyze them.The research was conducted in Rongxian Junior Middle School with a span of one semester.The subjects are two parallel classes of Grade 9 taught by the author and each class contains 55 students,in which Class 9 was chosen as the experimental class and Class 11 was chosen as the controlled class.The 55 students in the experimental class were taught under the new English listening teaching model based on schema theory,while the 55 students in the controlled class were taught under the traditional English listening teaching method.After the experiment,the author made use of SPSS 23.0 to analyze the collected data and then drew a conclusion.The one-semester experiment based on schema theory proves that some problems do exist in English listening class in Rongxian Junior Middle School,including students holding little interest and confidence in English listening,lacking awareness of developing good listening habits and using listening strategies.And the application of schema theory does contribute to English listening teaching and help improve students listening abilities.It proves that listening is an active process,in which students understand new information by connecting it with already existing information(schema)in their mind,so it is necessary for teachers to help students activate or build schema by explaining language points,cultural background knowledge,related information,etc.before listening.Also,some listening strategies,such as predicting listening content,supplementing information gap and selecting input information are necessary skills teachers need to teach students inside classes.Furthermore,consolidation after listening and students’ initiative towards listening(finding interesting materials to practice their listening spontaneously)are of equal importance,which is actually a process to build new schema in students’ mind and the new schema can help them understand the materials with a similar topic better in the next listening activity.At the end of the research,the author also introduces feasible measures teachers can take to improve students’ English listening abilities.Firstly,teachers should provide students with some basic knowledge and skills at thebeginning stage of listening teaching,such as training their pronunciation and developing their habit of predicting by previewing the questions and options.Secondly,teachers are supposed to help students accumulate the knowledge of cultural background and social customs in other countries.Thirdly,teachers should provide genre knowledge to students based on different kinds of listening discourses.Finally,teachers’ correct guidance and some activities organized after class are also necessary and fruitful.Although the research has achieved success to some degree,there are some deficiencies due to small-sized samples,short experimental time and the author’s weak interpretation of related theories,which are supposed to be compensated for in the future research.