A Study Of The Effect Of Reinforcing Background Knowledge As Input On Senior School Students' Listening Competence

As one of the four basic skills of language learning, listening skill is paid more and more attention by researchers. This thesis investigates into the influence of schema theory on listening comprehension to 117 students of senior high school students.It is supposed that if students have the background knowledge of the listening material, they will have the schema of the materials, which means they are familiar to the materials, and so they can understand the materials easily. Thus the main task of the teacher is to reinforce the background knowledge of the students. Of course, here the background knowledge is in a broad sense which contains the basic meaning of cultural background knowledge of English- speaking countries. Also it contains the basic knowledge of phonetics and intonations, grammar and vocabulary, etc.There are six parts in this thesis. Part One starts with a brief introduction to the aims and significance of this investigation. In the Part Two, the development and processes of listening teaching of English are introduced, and a survey of research in this regard at home and abroad is made. The third part introduces the theories involved in this investigation, including the Carrel's schema theory, Krashen's input hypothesis and affective hypothesis and cognitive approaches to listening comprehension.Part Four investigates and analyzes the reasons caused in the students' listening barriers and clarifies the relationship between background knowledge and listening comprehension. Part Five introduces the subjects and the procedure used in the author's this experiment, the methods used are also described carefully, which falls into twelve ways: to improve the students' background knowledge by means of singing English songs, by holding English parties , by vocabulary teaching, by English learning field, by school English broadcasting by reading background knowledge materials, by English competition on background knowledge, by establishing English corners, by giving warm-up of each class, by main grammar explaining in verse, by listening to English programs on TV and radio, and by telling English jokes, riddles doggerels and jingles. Part Six concerns itself with data analysis and discussion.Based upon the result of data analysis, conclusion can be drawn: Which kinds of barriers affect the students' listening comprehension are to be known first. What was found from the research is thatit is necessary for students to master the background knowledge because different cultures have different background. So teachers must make the students master some basic background knowledge by all kinds of means such as English learning field, broadcasting, English corners and so on. as reinforcing background knowledge can improve students' listening competence.The thesis ends with Part Seven which contains the conclusions and implications of the research as well as the suggestions for further research in this regard. Limitations of this research are presented in this part.