A Study Of PSI Schema In Listening Comprehension Teaching

The development of communicative competence is one of the primary objectives in English listening comprehension teaching. Many researches have been probed into its nature and characteristics. Currently, one of the prevailing perspectives toward the analysis of foreign language learning process is the schema theory. And the category of schema theory is not confined in a single way. In the field of social communication, the primary social interaction schemata (PSI schemata) have been widely utilized in a lot of aspects. This thesis attempts to expound on the application of PSI schemata in English listening comprehension teaching and learning with the aim of improving learners'communicative competence. It will focus on three research questions: (1) Can the scores of listening comprehension test represent the ability of communication? (2) Are the PSI schemata feasible and effective in English listening comprehension teaching and learning in order to improve the learners'communicative competence? (3) What detailed teaching methodology can be proposed by involving PSI schemata, and how to help the learners to construct various kinds of social interaction schemata in order to facilitate listening comprehension and to improve the communicative competence. The thesis starts with a literature review concerned with the concept of PSI schemata, communicative way of language teaching and how PSI schemata function in communication. These concepts provide a more comprehensive perspective to integrate PSI schemata with English listening comprehension and their interdependent relationship. Since improving students'communicative competence is the primary aim of teaching and learning listening, the present study attempts to testify whether there is a positive correlation between the scores of listening comprehension test and the communicative competence. The participants involved in this study are 80 sophomore non-English majors from Huazhong University of Science and Technology Wu Chang Branch. They are first required to take an English listening comprehension test to assess their listening comprehension proficiency and communicative competence. Then, 21 high score students and 22 low score students are selected according to their scores of Paper A which aims to examine the listening comprehension proficiency. And the scores of Paper A and Paper B have been compared. The results indicate that both high-score students and low-score students in Paper A, get relatively low scores in Paper B which aims to examine the communicative competence. This reveals that listening comprehension teaching and learning only remains at the level of linguistic competence, but not actually aims at the language performance. That means the students have comparatively low communicative competence. Subsequently, all the students have received four-week training which involves PSI schemata in the English listening comprehension instruction. After that, the students take another test which has the same framework as the former test. The scores are collected and analyzed by SPSS. The results in this study indicate that the PSI schemata are feasible and effective in listening comprehension teaching and communicative competence improvement. Based on the findings, some pedagogical implications have been proposed which with the purpose is to construct various kinds of social interaction schemata and to improve students'communicative competence.