The Application Of Schema Theory To ESL Listening Pedagogy

State Education Ministry is on the way of reforming college English teaching, with as the theme"developing students'comprehensive language competence, in particular, listening and speaking abilities so as to ensure effective communication in their future work and social life."More and more researchers and teachers come to realize the significance of L2 ( second language) listening teaching. However, generally speaking, on account of the traditional opinion that listening is unteachable, both teachers and students do not take listening classes very seriously. There have been quite a few ways considered to be instructive for improving listening ability. But this paper aims to explore listening pedagogy from schema-theoretical perspective, since it is applicable and practical on the large scale in listening teaching.The concept of Schema Theory dates back to Sir Frederic Bartlett in his most significant and influential work Remembering (1932). After 1970s schemata have been widely applied in the research on reading comprehension, but comparatively speaking, not much on listening, especially on L2 listening. In theory, Schema Theory is applicable to listening comprehension, too, because listeners use both bottom-up processes (linguistic knowledge) and top-down processes (prior knowledge ) to comprehend.This paper intends to explore how university English teachers can apply Schema Theory in listening classes and how students can use schemata to facilitate their listening processing. After reviewing the history of Schema Theory and some theoretical issues about listening, this paper elaborates on the findings and problems in listening teaching and learning according to the survey implemented in USST ( University of Shanghai for Science and Technology ). Then in response to those findings, a framework for classroom listening teaching is suggested with the pedagogical sequence of pre-listening, during-listening and post-listening activities. Finally, in order to testify to the feasibility and effectiveness of applying this framework to listening teaching, two experiments are carried out.