An Experimental Study Of The Schema Effect On Lower Intermediate Vocational College Students' Listening Comprehension

As we all know, in higher vocational colleges, most English teachers repeat such mechanical listening teaching method: students listen to tapes——teacher give the answers——students listen again. Under this teaching model, students'competence of listening comprehension is low in general, and listening teaching is lack of theoretical research and guidance. So it needs to reform this low-effective traditional listening teaching model, and find out an efficient teaching method to enhance students'competence of listening comprehension.As for the questions mentioned above, under the guidance of schema theory, this study adopts a quantitative design, and focuses on studying the effect of different schemata on listening comprehension for the lower intermediate vocational college students, tries to find out suitable teaching methods and improve students'listening competence. According to schema theory and as for the lower intermediate vocational college students, author chooses bottom-up information processing to teach listening and do research under the way of activating different schemata. The study puts forward the following questions:1. Does linguistic schema and additional content schema have impact on listening score? If they have impact, what is the result?2. Does content schema and additional formal schema have impact on listening score? If they have impact, what is the result?3. Does formal schema and additional linguistic schema have impact on listening score? If they have impact, what is the result?4. Is the way of mainly activating linguistic schema and additional content schema superior to other two ways?The study adopts the listening part of 2008 PRETCO level B as the sample test paper. And there are 116 students take part in the test. The result is analyzed by SPSS 13.0. The result of experiments shows that as for the lower intermediate vocational college students, three teaching methods have effect on listening comprehension. But the way of mainly activating linguistic schema and additional content schema has the better effect on listening than any other methods, and the effect is very obvious.This thesis has five parts. Introduction reviews research background of listening teaching, analyze existing questions and presents purpose and significance of the study. Chapter two briefly reviews schema theory and listening comprehension, and lists a lot of researches in China and other countries on schema theory used in listening comprehension. And it indicates that there have influences on listening comprehension with schema theory. Chapter three introduces the design of this study, including research questions, research subjects, procedure, data collection and data analysis. Chapter four reports the results of research questions and discusses the research questions one by one. Conclusion summaries the whole study, including major findings, pedagogical implications, limitations and suggestions for future research.