A Study On The Application Of Schema Theory To The EFL Listening Comprehension

Listening is the most important and difficult skill among the four basic languageskills—listening, speaking, reading and writing. According to some statistics, theproportion of listening in people's daily communication occupies as high as 45%. Afterwe became a member of WTO, the chances of international association are increasing.Therefore, to improve students' listening comprehension appears to be an urgent task inlanguage teaching. However, for the reason of the misunderstanding of listeningcomprehension and the single, outdated teaching approach, our students have poorlistening ability which cannot be improved effectively.In view of this existing situation, this study attempts to probe into the followingproblems: the current situation of listening teaching;schema and schema theory;theapplication of schema theory into listening teaching and the implication in listeningteaching with an experiment designed to verify the effectiveness and feasibility of theapplication. Hopefully this study can help to improve our daily language listeningteaching as well as our students' listening ability effectively.This thesis is composed of five chapters.The first chapter is the brief introduction of the current situation about listeningteaching. The misunderstanding of listening teaching and listening comprehension intraditional listening teaching is mentioned here. So are the problems existing in thedaily listening teaching. Furthermore, a study on current listening teaching in the worldis also concluded on the aspects of understanding the listening comprehension process,choosing listening strategies, improving listening teaching approach and so on. Basedon these researches, the current situation of listening teaching in China as well as themain existing problems are analyzed in this part.The second chapter presents schema and schema theory. It is the theoretical basisfor the whole thesis. The definition, classifications, characteristics of schema arediscussed in this part.The third chapter gives a detailed elaboration on the relationship between schematheory and listening teaching, that is, the application of schema theory into listeningteaching. It is the core of the thesis. As we know, cognitive psychologist divided theinformation process of human being into two main modes—"top-down process" and"bottom-up process". There is no exception in gaining information from listening.During the listening process, the factors influencing the students' listening abilityinclude not only their language ability but also some non-language, non-knowledgeones, which make the application of schema theory suitable and feasible in improvinglistening ability. In practical listening teaching, it is a vital condition to apply differenttypes of schemata into different types of listening materials suitably for the aim ofimproving listening ability. To this point, a detailed elaboration can be found in this partwith the emphasis on the application of textural schema, which is always ignored inmany former studies. Another emphasis is put on the application of content schema intothe most difficult listening materials—news report. That is to say, the importance ofbackground knowledge in listening comprehension also gets full explanation in thispart.In the forth chapter, there is an experiment designed for the application of schematheory. It consists of objectives, participants, methodology, result and statistical analysis,which can verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the application of schema theory.The last chapter focuses on the implication of schema theory in listening teachingand limitations in practical listening teaching.