The Study On The Application Of Schema Theory In The Teaching Of College English Listening

Listening is a vital component of the English language teaching and learning and provides the base for the growth of reading, writing, and speaking abilities. Listening comprehension is an active process. In the process, what the listener wants to get is an adequate understanding of what the speaker says and what the speaker means. To attain this purpose, the listener has to utilize background knowledge, contextual clues and depend on many learning strategies. Active listener will understand what the speaker says with relevant background knowledge and his particular purpose.The current situation of the teaching of college English listening in China is still unsatisfactory, especially that for non-English majors. In college English listening class, the teaching of listening is often characterized by explaining new words and grammatical knowledge. In the listening process, students are often viewed as passive receivers. This way of teaching severely frustrates students' initiative and restrains the students' interest and creativity.In view of these kinds of problems, this thesis takes up the guidance of schema theory to the teaching of English listening as the research focus. Schema theory holds the view that listeners' background knowledge plays a key role in understanding a new text. According to schema theory, listening comprehension is an interactive model, which includes bottom-up and top-down models. Listeners use both bottom-up and top-down approaches to interpret listening message. In listening comprehension process, listeners should make their background knowledge active and use the knowledge to interpret the new text. The listener's schemata determine what he comprehends, how well he comprehends, and whether he can comprehend at all. In order to demonstrate the positive role of schema in listening comprehension process, two studies are conducted. The first study is carried out to test the hypothesis that listeners with high linguistic proficiency level will usually show a superior listening comprehension. The result shows that high degree in linguistic proficiency does not necessarily correspond with high scores in listening tests, which implies that listening comprehension is not simply a function of language proficiency. There must be some other factors that contribute to successful listening apart from the linguistic factor. Then, under the belief that students' listening comprehension can be enhanced by making them familiar with the schema, the second study is conducted, which is based on the hypothesis that listeners who have been familiarized with the schema concerned will get better score than those who haven't. The collected data indicate that the prepared experimental class which is familiarized with the schema has made significant improvement while the non-prepared controlled class has got a lower score, which suggests that familiarization with the schemata concerned does prepare listeners for comprehension. The results show that listeners' existing schemata exert great effect on listening comprehension.Therefore, schema theory is applied in practical teaching of English listening. Schemata should be activated through providing pre-listening activities. By doing an experiment, the author concludes that the new approach based on schema theory is more effective than the traditional teaching approach in improving students' listening comprehension ability.Schema theory has much implication for the teaching of English listening. Therefore, it is possible and feasible to apply schema theory as the methodological guidance in the teaching of college English listening. However, schema theory has its limitation, for it cannot provide explicitly the explanation of all the phenomenon or process concerning listening comprehension. Therefore, much broader research in this respect needs to be further studied.