Schema Theory And The Teaching Of Listening Comprehension

Listening, as one of the most important communication skills, is the basis for the development of reading, writing and speaking abilities. For a long time, however, listening has not been given its due attention in listening teaching and studying. And for non-English majors, listening ability remains the weak point and need to be improved.Listening, just like reading, was believed as a passive one-way comprehensive process. However, with the development of language teaching, listening comprehension is found to be an interactive process of two-way communication, during which listeners' background knowledge play an important role. Schema theory lays theoretical foundation for this explanation. It claims that listening comprehension is an interactive process between listeners' linguistic knowledge, background knowledge and the incoming information. And the activation of the schematic knowledge is key important in the process of successful listening comprehension.Focusing on the content schema activation, this thesis explores the possible activities and strategies in listening class from schematic perspective. A three-month teaching experiment is conducted with the application of schema theory in listening teaching. The data of the final test prove that these schema-oriented teaching activities are applicable and effective in listening teaching. And this conclusion is further proved by the analysis of the think-aloud scripts.In sum, schema theory enables English teachers to perform more effective teaching method and help students improve their listening ability.