A Research On The Application Of Top-down Information Processing Model In Rural Senior High School English Listening Teaching

English listening skills,an important and fundamental knowledge capability,occupies a critical corner in the procedure of internalizing and applying language.But the current situation,in which English listening is affected by many factors,such as the times of tapes’ playing,the speed of broadcasting equipment and the difficulty of listening materials,has caused many students to be very afraid of English listening,thus making English listening teaching a major difficulty in English teaching activities.In the process of implementing the listening experiment,the author,on the basis of summarizing the literature review,giving out and analyzing the questionnaires,as well as conducting interviews on teachers and students,finds that English listening has been ignored for a long time from the perspective of listening teaching researches and work in the rural schools.In addition,senior high school English teaching has been under great pressure.Thus,it is urgent to find the strategies of improving the students’ English listening skills and expanding students’ listening learning strategies in rural senior high schools.Based on the theoretical foundation of information processing theory and schema theory,this research mainly starts from the definition and main contents of the two theories.And then the author generalizes the top-down information processing model in English listening teaching by combining the strong points of the two theories.At the same time,the thesis has also studied these three questions: 1)What is the current situation of English listening teaching in rural senior high schools? 2)Is top-down information processing model,based on information processing theory and schema theory,effective in improving students’ current English listening situation? If so,is it shown in the aspects of the students’ listening learning motivation,basic English knowledge accumulating or language inputting.3)What are the students’ attitudes towards the application of top-down information processing model into English listening teaching? And the textbook for this experiment is New Senior English for China Student’s Book 1.During the 16-week listening experiment,the author employs the experimental method to test the students and then applies the following four research tools,including the pre-test and post-test papers of English listening,the questionnaires,SPSS 22.0 and the interviews.Before the experiment,the author selects a rural senior high school in Yichun city as the research object,and then conducts a research on 35 English teachers of the school and 100 students taught by the author,from class 1 and2 in Grade 1.The questionnaires,conducted on teachers and students,are given out to master the teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards English listening and take teaching measures to promote the current situation of English listening teaching.Moreover,the author selects 34 students respectively from class 1 and class 2 who have no significant differences in their listening grades,which aims to offer the reliable listening data.Then,the results of the statistics of pre-and post-listening tests,as well as the questionnaires,are dealt with SPSS 22.0.During the process of post-experiment,the author interviews the tested students once again,mainly knowing their attitudes towards the top-down information processing model in English listening teaching and adjusting the listening teaching methods in the future timely.After 16 weeks of this listening experiment,the author has reached the following conclusions: 1)English listening teaching methods,based on top-down information processing model,can improve students’ English listening capacities.2)Compared with the traditional listening teaching methods,this teaching methods,based on top-down information processing model,have the great advantages in improving students’ English listening interest and level.3)The situation,faced with the rural senior high schools in English listening,has still been very severely.And it is mainly shown in the two aspects.At first,the teachers and the students do not pay enough attention to English listening.Secondly,the students’ listening learning strategies are not systematic enough,and the playing equipment of listening practicing is poor.At the same time,the author concludes that this listening teaching experiment has the following research significance.Firstly,it can improve students’ English learning motivation and their capabilities of processing listening information.Moreover,it can promote students’ mastery of basic English knowledge.And finally,it can also ameliorate the current listening situation of students.To sum up,the situation,faced with the English listening in teaching and research,is still very severe,and there is a long way to go to change the status quo that English listening has been neglected for a long time.In addition,although English listening teaching,based on top-down information processing model,can improve students’ current listening situation,the author’s experiments still have had some limitations,including fewer research objects,single experimental areas,shorter experimental periods,and the author’s limited research abilities,which all make the experiment of this thesis need to be improved in the future.Last but not least,the author also offers some recommendations for listening teaching,hoping to be helpful to other listening researchers and teachers.