Applying Schema Theory Into Listening Teaching

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 contextual clues, background knowledge and depend on many learning strategies. Active listeners will understand what the speaker said with relevant background knowledge and their particular purpose. In China, there exist some problems in college English listening class. Professor Wang Zhongyan said, "In listening classes, it is usual that teachers just play records without offering any hints." In the listening process, listeners are only viewed as passive receiver without any hints. After listeners listen once or twice, teachers check the answers, and then play the tape sentence by sentence. This kind of teaching of listening is far from developing students' competence. The results of questionnaires in this study prove that the students lack culture schema and lexical schema. The analysis of the students' mistakes in dictation part in listening exam further proves that the students lack linguistic schemata, formal schemata and content schemata.In view of this kind of problem, this paper takes up the guidance of schema theory to listening teaching as its topic to study. Schema theory holds the view that listeners' background knowledge plays a key role in understanding a new text. Rumelhart (1980) holds the view that "the role of background knowledge in language comprehension has been formalized as schema theory." According to schema theory, a listener can understand a new text only when he utilizes previously acquired knowledge. The previously acquired knowledge is the listeners' background knowledge, and the previously acquired knowledge structures are schemata. Therefore, comprehending a text is an interactive process between the listener's background knowledge and the text. Background knowledge involves all the knowledge the listeners learned before, such as linguistic knowledge, social knowledge, cultural knowledge, common sense, etc. To understand the action of background knowledge well, schematic knowledge is thought to be three types: linguistic schemata (The skills of decoding and discourse processing), content schemata (knowledge of the content area of the text) and formal schemata (recognizing the rhetorical structure of the text). And according to schema theory, there is an interactive model in the process of comprehending a text between bottom-up process and top-down process, so listeners can make use of them to understand the new text compensatory. In the listening process, listeners should make their background knowledge active and use them to interpret the new text. Due to the theory and research, schema theory can guide listening teaching.Listening comprehension is like a building bridge between the new and the known. Listeners should relate what is known to interpret the new information. Whether listeners can understand a new text depends, to a large degree, on how much background knowledge they have activated, so teachers should provide students with relevant background knowledge in many ways in order that students can use them to predict and interpret the incominginformation, and finally understand the main idea.The above theory and research imply that some schemata-building should be used. For example, we can help the students to build phonological and lexical schema in view of the problem of decoding sound and word. We also help the students to build content schema in view of the lack of culture background knowledge. Some strategies can be employed in three stages activities in teaching of listening, especially pre-listening and post-listening activity, In pre-listening activities, we have ETR (experience-text-relationship) method and "semantic mapping" method. Some detailed strategies are further mentioned such as previewing, listening for gist, listening for specific information, setting the scene and using non-verbal clues. In practical listening teaching, the students should be divided into two kinds: intermediate-advanced and low-level students. To some low-level students, teachers should help them establish the general gist of the text, so teachers should ask them to pay attention to linguistic features, such as making predictions, identifying phonetic and guessing new words, etc. To some proficient students, teachers should try to activate students' relevant cultural background knowledge, make them extract main idea so that they can reconstruct the meaning of a new text, such as providing background knowledge and setting the scene. Thus, listeners are active in listening process, and they can attain their aims according to their different levels.