A Study Of The Effects Of Background Knowledge On Listening Comprehension Of Non-English Majors In Colleges

Listening is a vital component of the English language in teaching and in learning which provides the base for the development of reading, writing, and speaking abilities. However, the current situation of the teaching of college English listening in China is still unsatisfactory, especially that for non-English majors. This study investigated how learners' background knowledge of the listening material has an effect on listening comprehension.A review of the literature shows that active listeners will understand what the speaker says with relevant background knowledge. Schematic knowledge can be divided into three types:content schemata, formal schemata and linguistic schemata. The modes of information processing include top-down and bottom-up processes and the interactive mode. In the listening process, listeners should build up the relevant schemata, activate them and then use them to interpret the new text.In this study, the author intends to answer three questions:1) Does background knowledge aid Chinese non-English major college students'listening comprehension? 2) How does background knowledge affect high language proficiency level subjects and low language proficiency level subjects in listening comprehension? 3) Does Background knowledge have a stronger effect on open-ended comprehension questions or closed-ended comprehension questions?Subjects in this study were non-English major students selected from Baotou Teachers' College. There were a total of 48 subjects in this experimental study. The experimental group received some treatment in the form of topic familiarity, and their background knowledge was activated. Then 4 tests of listening comprehension were administered to both the experimental and the controlled groups. Subjects were tested for their comprehension of each listening passage in two ways:open-ended questions and closed-ended questions, in addition, a semi-structured interview. Data from the experiments were analyzed using SPSS to answer the three questions proposed in this study. A statistical analysis of the results provides some evidence in support of the effect of background knowledge on listening comprehension.The findings showed that background knowledge has a positive effect on subjects' listening comprehension. Regarding subjects with background information of the listening material, higher language proficiency subjects tended to perform better than lower language proficiency subjects. Meanwhile, subjects outperformed in doing opened-ended questions than in doing closed-ended ones in comprehension tests.Nonetheless, this thesis still has some limitations. As for the limitations, there is still much work to do in the future to make further research of the present study on the application of schema theory into English listening teaching.