The Building-up Of Automaticity And Schemata In Listening Practice

Sounds surround us. Unless we are aurally handicapped we can scarcely avoid listening. For us language learners, listening comprehension may be the most important and fundamental of the four skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing; yet, it is probably the least stressed skill in the language classroom. Some teachers think that listening is the easiest skill to teach, whereas most students think it is the most difficult to improve. Perhaps those who regard listening course as "the easiest to teach" mean that it does not require much painstaking lesson preparation and all the need to do is to play the tapes, ask the students to listen and test the students' comprehension. Listening skill is taken for granted and naturally, listening instruction has been neglected. What is listening? What are involved in listening comprehension? And what should listening teaching be like? Few can give satisfactory answers. This article is a rethinking of listening from the perspective of psycholinguistics. The author makes an attempt to answer the three questions above and probe into every stage of listening comprehension. He finds out that bottom-up and top-down processes exist in each stage of listening comprehension. Finally, he presents the idea that listening teachers should help students build up automaticity and schemata in listening practice. Owing to the limitations of his capacities, he cannot, naturally, thoroughly and deeply explore each aspects of listening comprehension. There is much left for further study and revision. The thesis is composed of three parts. The first part presents a brief introduction of listening and a discussion of the importance of listening and people's misconceptions about listening, which suggest the necessity of studying listening.The second part gives a detailed definition of listening, then, guided by this definition, it explores into each stage of listening comprehension, finding out that bottom-up and top-down processes exist in all the stages.Part three focuses on the building up of automaticity and schemata respectively in bottom-up and top-down processes. The author suggests that in listening practice we should try to build up automaticity and schemata. Only in this way can we improve our listening skill.