The Application Of Schema Theory Into English Listening Teaching In Secondary Vocational Schools

Listening comprehension, as one of the four language skills, plays an important role in communication. It is also one of the most difficult tasks for the language learners, yet it is probably the most neglected skill in foreign language teaching. In language teaching, listening comprehension used to be thought of as a passive skill. Listeners were called as"tape-recorder". However, in fact it is an active process, and listening itself is a skill in its own right. In the listening process, what the listener wants to get is an adequate understanding of what the speaker said and what the speaker meant. To attain this purpose, listeners should utilize contextual clues, background knowledge and depend on many learning strategies. Active listeners will understand what the speakers said with relevant background knowledge and their particular purpose. In recent years, studies on application of schema theory into listening comprehension become more and more popular in both pedagogical theory and experiments. This thesis shows the great influence of schema on listening comprehension through the study of two classes in Shandong Light Industry Engineering School (a Secondary Vocational School).Listening is important in foreign language teaching, so it is gradually drawn attention by some educators in recent years. In China, there exist some problems in English listening class of Secondary Vocational School. Professor Wang Zongyan said,"In listening classes, it is not unusual that teachers just play records without offering any hints."In the listening process, listeners are only viewed as passive receivers without any hints. After listeners listen once or twice, teachers check the answers, and then play the tape sentence by sentence. This kind of teaching of listening is far from developing students'competence. It seems much like testing listening. So after three-year English study, the students'English ability don't improve any more, let alone the communication with other people in daily life.In view of this kind of problem, this thesis applies schema theory into the listening comprehension and studies the influence. Schemata are a person's existing concepts about the world, or in other words, are the previously acquired knowledge structures, including linguistic knowledge, cultural knowledge and so on. Bartlett (1932) is the first psychologist to use the term schema. Rumelhart (1980) holds the view that"the role of background knowledge in language comprehension has been formalized as schema theory". According to schema theory, listeners can understand a new text only when they utilize previously acquired knowledge. The previously acquired knowledge is the listeners'background knowledge. Therefore, comprehending a text is an interactive process between the listeners'background knowledge and the text. Furthermore, these schemata can play a role only being activated. Schematic knowledge is thought to be three types: content schemata, formal schemata and linguistic schemata. The modes of information processing include top-down and bottom-up processes and interactive mode. In the listening process, listeners should build up the relevant schemata and make them active and then use them to interpret the new text. Due to the theory and research, schema theory can guide the teaching of listening.Listening comprehension is like building a bridge between the new and the known. Listeners should relate what is known to interpret the new information. Whether listeners can understand a new text depends to a large degree on how much background knowledge they have activated. Teachers should provide students with relevant background knowledge in many ways in order that students can use them to predict and interpret the incoming information, and finally understand the main idea.There are four chapters in this thesis. Chapter One reviews the listening teaching studies at home and abroad; the schema and listening studies at home and abroad; and the listening teaching in Secondary Vocational School in China. Chapter Two mainly introduces the schema theory, which provides support to this study. In this chapter, it also discusses the nature and processes of listening comprehension - top-down processing, bottom-up processing and interactive processing. Chapter Three is mainly about experiment and its design. It introduces hypotheses, subjects, instruments and procedures of this experiment as well. Chapter three also analyzes the results of the experiment with the help of the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) and discusses the significance of the experiment for teachers and learners. Chapter Four gives methods for listening teaching, implications for listening teaching, some pedagogical suggestions for teachers to teach listening comprehension and the integration of the four skills.Based on the results of the data analysis, we can conclude that the students of Secondary Vocational School lack schemata, which can affect their listening comprehension; It is effective to apply schema theory into our daily English listening teaching; Different schemata can influence students'listening comprehension, that is, different linguistic schemata, content schemata and formal schemata can affect students'listening comprehension differently. All in all, this thesis highlights the application of schema theory into English teaching and aims at improving students'English listening comprehension ability by enriching their different kinds of schemata in Secondary Vocational School in China. Nonetheless, this thesis still lays some limitations. For the limitations, there is much work to do in the future to make further research of present study on the application of schema theory into English listening teaching. I hope that this thesis can draw more attention to study English listening teaching.