Schema Theory And English News Listening

English news listening takes an important role in EFL listening comprehension, yet it has been a bottleneck both for the students to learn and for the teachers to teach. This paper tends to explore English news listening with the help of schema theory.Schema theory, dating back to Sir Frederic Bartlett in his famous work Remembering (1932), has been widely applied to the research on reading comprehension which is "an interactive process between the reader's background knowledge and the text"(Carrell and Eisterhold, 2006:76), yet few on listening comprehension. While, it is applicable to listening comprehension, since listening comprehension is an interaction between the listener's background or more precisely schematic knowledge and the spoken text. Linguistic schema, content schema and formal schema are regarded as the three main factors affecting listeners in their English news listening.The study attempts to answer the following questions: 1) What are the common problems students confront in the learning of English news listening and how important do they think of schema theory in the learning of English news listening? 2) Whether three schemata have any effect on students' English news listening and how? 3) What are the common problems teachers confront in the teaching of English news listening? While, for the second research question, there are two hypotheses to be examined: a) All the three schemata improve students' English news listening, among which linguistic schema acts the most, formal schema the least. b) The effect of content schema on language proficient students is greater than on less proficient ones.The study was carried out among 128 sophomores majoring in English at Zhejiang Wanli University with one questionnaire, two English news listening tests (the pre-test and the post-rest), and also among teachers with some interview. The data were collected with the assistance of SPSS 11.0. The major findings of the research can be summarized as follows: firstly, students' problems in English news listening mainly fall into the categories of linguistic knowledge, background knowledge and structural knowledge which are in accordance with the three schemata of schema theory; secondly, the two hypotheses are tested to be almost right, with the exception that the effect of formal schema is not significant; thirdly, teachers' main problems of feeling pressed for time in class and lacking proper textbook in English news listening become the obstacles for them to try schema theory, and moreover, how to teach content knowledge is quite thorny.Therefore, to conquer English news listening, students need to be fully equipped with the three schemata of English news listening, and be ready to activate and modify these schemata effectively while listening. And, for teachers, they are expected to give proper instructions to students, select right materials for students to practice, and encourage students to care about world affairs and well exploit after-class time.