The Application Of Schema Theory In The Teaching Of Listening

Now in China, there exist some problems in college English listening class. In listening classes, teachers apply traditional teaching mode: playing recorders, listening and checking answers, without offering any background knowledge .In the listening process, listeners are only viewed as passive receivers. This kind of teaching is far from developing students' competence. It is fact that the students' listening competence is in a low level.Listening is used for more than other single language skill in normal daily life. Also, it is important in foreign language teaching. It is one of the four basic language skills. The teaching of listening as ESL is gradually drawn attention by some educators.Listening comprehension has traditionally been regarded as a passive process. However, it is an active process. 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 background knowledge and depend on learning strategies. Active listeners will understand what the speaker said and their particular purpose and attitude with relevant background knowledgeIn view of those problems, 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 an important role in understanding new information. The background knowledge in language comprehension has been formalized schema. The listener's background knowledge involves linguistic knowledge and non-linguistic knowledge and culture background knowledge. Schematic knowledge is divided into four types: event schemata, contextual schemata, role schemata and content schemata. According to schema theory, there are two ways in the process of listening comprehension, bottom-up process and top-down process. Whether listeners can understand new information depends to a large degree on how much background knowledge they have activated.Therefore this paper put forward inductive schemata, just as a bridge between the new and the known. Students can use it to predict, interpret the incoming information, and finally understand the main idea. This paper designs a teaching mode and tells us what andhow we should do, which aims to improve the teaching of listening and develop students' listening competence.