The Impact Of Decoding Theory On Non-English Majors' Listening Comprehension

Listening comprehension has often been seen as a passive activity. It is, on the contrary, an active process in which the listener must discriminate among sounds, understand words and grammar, interpret intonation and other prosodic clues, and retain information gathered long enough to interpret it in the context or setting in which the exchange takes place. In short, listening is a complex activity which requires substantial mental effort.This study was designed to evaluate the impact of decoding theory on second language listening comprehension through activating students' schemata. Based on theories of encoding and decoding, cognitive psychology and schema, schema activated training has theoretically been regarded as a useful teaching and learning device in second language learning, but few empirical studies did reveal significant difference between the experimental group and the control group, especially for L2 listening comprehension. The main purpose of teaching listening was to cultivate the students' listening skill in order to help them to be aware what to listen and how to listen.This paper is composed of seven parts. The first part starts with the background to the present study, then followed by the importance of listening comprehension, current situation of English listening teaching and purpose of the study as well as the significance of the study. Part Two includes the basic research theories: the theory of cognitive psychology, the theory of encoding and decoding and the theory of schema. Part Three reviews the previous studies in this regard. In Part Four, we first advance the hypothesis, and then provide some information concerning the subjects, materials as well as the procedures of the study. The fifth part presents the statistical results in addition to the data analysis which falls into two parts: questionnaire results and test results. Part Six concerns itself with the discussion about the findings obtained from the present study. The paper ends with the seventh part which mainly contains the conclusions, the implications achieved from this study as well as the limitations to this study.More specifically, according to decoding theory, the study aimed to employ the schema activated training to help students improve their listening comprehension during listening process. The participants were 113 freshmen from two intact classes in Lanzhou University. They were randomly divided into a control group and an experimental group. To begin with, the two groups were similar and given a pre-test. The experimental group received schema activated training. At the end of the semester. a post-test was conducted. The results showed that the two groups were significantly different in listening comprehension as a result. Pre-/post-treatment questionnaires were also conducted in experimental group and control group to investigate the efficiency after the implementation of different teaching methods.By undertaking the research, the author aimed at a profound understanding of second language listening process and sought to apply the schema to facilitate the second language listeners in hopes of improving their listening comprehension performance and promoting their motivation and self-confidence as well.