Schema Theory And The Teaching Of Listening

Listening comprehension has traditionally 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 said and what the speaker meant. To attain this purpose, listeners should utilize contextual clues, background knowledge and depend on many learning strategies. Active listeners will understand what the speaker said with relevant background knowledge and their particular purpose.Listening is very important. It is used for more than any other single language skill in normal daily life. Also, it is important hi foreign language teaching. It is one of the four basic language skills. Teaching listening comprehension as a part of teaching a second language is gradually drawn attention by some educators. In China, there exist some problems hi college English listening class. Professor Wang Zhongyan said, "hi listening classes, It is not unusual that teachers just play records without offering any hints." In the listening process, listeners are only viewed as passive receiver without any hints. After listeners listen one or two tunes, teachers check the answers, and then play the tape sentence by sentence. This kind of teaching of listening is far from developing students' competence. It seems much like testing listening. In view of this kind of problem, this paper takes up the guidance of schema theory to the teaching of listening as its topic to study. Schema theory holds the view that listeners' background knowledge plays a key role in understanding a new text. Bartlett (1932) is the first psychologist to use the term schema. Rumelhart (1980) holds the view that "the role of background knowledge hi language comprehension has been formalized as schema theory." According toschema theory, a listener can understand a new text only when he utilizes previously acquired knowledge. The previously acquired knowledge is the listeners' background knowledge, and the previously acquired knowledge structures are schemata. Therefore, comprehending a text is an interactive process between the listener's background knowledge and the text.Background knowledge involves all the knowledge the listener learned before, such as linguistic knowledge, social knowledge, cultural knowledge, common sense, etc. To understand the action of background knowledge well, schematic knowledge is thought to be two types: content schemata and formal schemata. And according to schema theory, there is an interactive model in the process of comprehending a text; bottom-up process and top-down process. The two processes interact, so listeners can make use of them to understand the new text compensatory. In the listening process, listeners should make their background knowledge active and use them to interpret the new text. Due to the theory and research, schema theory can guide the teaching of listening.Listening comprehension is like building bridges between the new and the known. Listeners should relate what is known to interpret the new information. That the previous background knowledge affects the new knowledge is called knowledge transfer. Whether listeners can understand a new text depends to a large degree on how much background knowledge they have activated. To a familiar content text, knowledge transfer is easy, so linguistic features should be paid more attention to. To an unfamiliar content text, knowledge transfer is difficult, so teachers should provide students with relevant background knowledge in many ways in order that students can use them to predict, interpret the incoming information, and finally understand the main idea.The above theory and research imply that some pedagogical principles can beemployed in the teaching of listening. For example, global and selective listening should be both used; preparation is vital, different listening materials demand different listening task; listening texts should be relevant; listening comprehension lessons...