Schema Theory And Listening Comprehension

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 thelistening process, what the listener wants to get is an adequate understanding of whatthe speaker said and what the speaker meant. To attain this purpose, listeners shouldutilize contextual clues, background knowledge and depend on many learning strategies.Active listeners will understand what the speakers said with relevant backgroundknowledge and their particular purpose. Through the study of the two classes inShandong Shengli Vocational College, the thesis shows the influence of backgroundknowledge on listening comprehension.In China, there exist some problems in college English listening class. ProfessorWang Zhongyan said, "In listening classes, it is not unusual that teachers just playrecords without offering any hints." In the listening process, listeners are only viewed aspassive receivers without any hints. After listeners listen one or two times, teacherscheck the answers, and then play the tape sentence by sentence. This kind of teaching oflistening is far from developing students' competence. It seems much like testinglistening.In view of this kind of problem, the thesis uses schema theory to study the impactof background knowledge on listening comprehension. Schema theory holds the viewthat 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) holdsthe view that "the role of background knowledge in language comprehension has beenformalized as schema theory". According to schema theory, a listener can understand anew text only when he utilizes previously acquired knowledge. The previously acquiredknowledge is the listeners' background knowledge. Therefore, comprehending a text isan interactive process between the listeners' background knowledge and the text.Background knowledge involves all the knowledge the listener learned before, such aslinguistic knowledge, social knowledge, cultural knowledge, common sense, etc. In thelistening process, listeners should make their background knowledge active and usethem to interpret the new text.Listening comprehension is like building a bridge between the new and the known.Listeners should relate what is known to interpret the new information. Whetherlisteners can understand a new text depends to a large degree on how much backgroundknowledge they have activated. Teachers should provide students with relevantbackground knowledge in many ways in order that students can use them to predict andinterpret the incoming information, and finally understand the main idea.There are five chapters in this thesis. Chapter One reviews the nature and processof listening comprehension and presents the representative achievements in listeningcomprehension researches at home and abroad. Chapter Two mainly introduces theschema theory, which provides support to this study. Chapter Three introduces thesubjects, materials, procedures and methods used in this experiment. Chapter Fouranalyzes the results of the experiment with the help of the Statistical Package for theSocial Sciences (SPSS) and discusses the significance of the experiment for teachersand learners. Chapter Five gives some pedagogical suggestions on listeningcomprehension.Based on the results of the data analysis, we can conclude that vocational collegestudents lack background knowledge, which affects their understanding of listeningmaterials. It is necessary for the students to master background knowledge. Backgroundknowledge can be acquired and reinforcing students' background knowledge canimprove their listening competence.