Application Of Schema Theory In English Listening Teaching

Listening comprehension, as one of the four language skills, takes up a very important status in communication. Listening is also one of the most difficult tasks for language learners, and it has been regarded as a passive process. However, it is an active process, and listening itself is a skill in its own right. In the listening process, what the listener wants to get is an adequate understanding of what the speaker says and what the speaker means. To attain this purpose, listeners should utilize contextual clues and background knowledge depending on many learning strategies.In the traditional listening classes in China, students listen to the tape or videos passively and are asked to answer questions after that, without being offered any hints or background knowledge. This kind of teaching of listening is far from developing students'competence. The analysis of the students'mistakes in dictation part in listening exam proves that the students lack linguistic schemata, formal schemata and content schemata.In view of the problems existing in the teaching of listening, there is no doubt that solutions should be found out to improve college English listening teaching. This paper takes up the guidance of schema theory to listening teaching as its topic to study. Schema theory holds the view that listeners'background knowledge plays a key role in understanding a new text. According to schema theory, comprehending a text is an interactive process between the learner's background knowledge and the content of the text. Knowledge can be transferred from the known to the new, and it is suggested that the goal of college English listening class is to help students activate their background knowledge and use them to understand the new text. Background knowledge involves all the knowledge the listeners learned before, such as linguistic knowledge, social knowledge, cultural knowledge, common sense, etc,which is called schema. Schematic knowledge is divided into three types: linguistic schemata (the skills of decoding and discourse processing), content schemata (knowledge of the content area of the text) and formal schemata (recognizing the rhetorical structure of the text). Schemata knowledge can facilitate listening, so in the listening process, listeners should make their background knowledge active and use it to interpret the new text.Listening comprehension is like building a bridge between the new and the known. Listeners should relate what is known to interpret the new information. Whether listeners can understand a new text depends, to a large degree, on how much background knowledge they have activated, so teachers should provide students with relevant background knowledge in many ways in order that students can use them to predict and interpret the incoming information, and finally understand the main idea.Schema theory implies that some pedagogical principles can be employed in the teaching of listening. For example, global and selective listening should be both used; preparation is vital; different listening materials demand different listening tasks; listening texts should be relevant; listening comprehension lessons should be taught, not be tested; listeners should be active; conscious listening strategies should be developed.In practical teaching of listening, some strategies can be employed at three stages of (pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening) activities, especially in pre-listening and post-listening activities. In pre-listening activities, we have some methods, such as"semantic mapping"method. In this paper, the listening texts are divided into two kinds: familiar schematic content and unfamiliar schematic content. To the familiar schematic content, students have established the general gist of the text, so teachers should ask students to pay attention to linguistic features, such as making predictions, guessing new words, identifying important stressed lexical items, etc. To some unfamiliar schematic content, teachers should try to activate students'relevant background knowledge, making them extract main idea so that they can reconstruct the meaning of a new text, such as providing background knowledge, listening for the general gist by identifying cohesive devices, listening selectively to detect important details. Thus, listeners are active in a listening process, and they can attain their aims according to different texts.It is hoped that through a deeper understanding of the mechanism of schema theory, students will consciously or unconsciously take advantage of schema for active processing of information and enhance their English listening proficiency.