A Contrastive Study On The Effect Of Background Knowledge And Textual Knowledge On Listening Comprehension Of College English

Listening comprehension is an important skill in the daily verbal communication, and cultivating students'listening ability is also one of the important contents of China's college English teaching. Therefore, listening comprehension gets more and more attention from researchers. In recent years, along with the further application of schema theory in the field of foreign language teaching, its application in listening teaching has also been extensively researched both at home and abroad. However, these researches mostly focus on the effect of background knowledge on listening comprehension, ignoring the significance of the textual knowledge in the listening comprehension. Moreover, the domestic researches on this aspect are just at the beginning stage. The limited researches have only discussed the importance of background knowledge in listening comprehension theoretically, while far few researches have been based on the quantitative analysis. In consideration of this, this thesis attempts to discuss the effect of background knowledge and textual knowledge on listening comprehension from the experimental point. Three questions are addressed in this experiment: 1) Whether the background knowledge does have remarkable effect on the subjects'English listening proficiency or not; 2) Whether the textual knowledge does have remarkable effect on the subjects'English listening proficiency or not; 3) Between the background knowledge and textual knowledge, which one may have greater effects on the subjects'English listening proficiency?120 sophomores from the College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering in Xuchang University are involved as the subjects in the present study. This study utilizes the listening comprehension test and questionnaires as instruments to collect the experimental data. Both the Excel and SPSS software are used to process the relevant data. The experimental results demonstrate that: 1) The background knowledge does have positive effect on the subjects'English listening proficiency; 2) The textual knowledge does also have positive effect on the subjects'English listening proficiency; 3) The effect of background knowledge on the subjects'English listening proficiency is greater than the effect of textual knowledge on the subjects'English listening proficiency.In view of the above findings, listeners possessing certain background knowledge and textual knowledge can exert a positive influence upon English listening comprehension. Compared with the effect of textual knowledge, the background knowledge has much greater effect upon English listening comprehension. Hopefully, through this experiment, more and more English instructors and learners can take cognizance of the significance of both the background knowledge and textual knowledge in listening comprehension, so that English listening teaching and learning would be instructed more effectively.