The Experimental Research On The Effect Of Schematic Knowledge And Language Proficiency On ESL Listening Comprehension

This paper aims to understand the effect of schematic knowledge end language proficiency on ESL listening comprehension through experimental research and attempts to answer the following questions: 1. Does schematic knowledge affect ESL students' listening comprehension? If so , is it always positive? 2. Can the effect of schematic knowledge be affected by students' language proficiency? If so, how? 3. hi what way do ESL students employ bottom-up and top-down in listening process?In the research, two groups of students are formed: Group A has 35 Senior One high school students and Group B has 35 Senior Three high school students. They are randomly sampled. Two listening passages are chosen, one of which is about traffic accident, of which these high school students have schematic knowledge (in this paper, the concept of which is narrowed down as content schematic knowledge or cultural background knowledge or familiar topic); the other, is about how a college student applies for courses, of which the students have no schematic knowledge at all. The topic familiarity level of these two passages is decided according to a relative background knowledge survey before the experiment and the answer sheets from the students. After a quantitative and qualitative analysis, this paper employs schema theory to make specific and detailed analysis of the students' open-minded answers and their recalled records, tracing their cognitive process during listening, then comes to a conclusion. To high school students, the still lower-level ESL language learners, language proficiency is still the base of their listening comprehension. Without basic language knowledge, the students find it hard to activate their prior knowledge, especially to the passage that the students are lacking in relative schematic knowledge. The students in Senior Three are significantly better than those in Senior One. On the other hand, schematic knowledge almost affects the whole process of listening comprehension, but its influence can be either negative or positive. During the listening process, all the students apply both bottom-up and top-down processing models, but the bottom-up seems to be the first step. In the end, the author presents her own ESL listening process model.Based on the above experimental analysis and conclusion, the author suggests that schematic knowledge that the students have had should be taken into consideration in teachers' compiling or selecting text-books. In class, the task difficulty should be based on whether the students have the knowledge about that or not. Besides, high school teachers should also pay attention to listening micro-skills training in order to help the students to improve the decoding ability of language signals during the process oflistening. Overall language proficiency training (including reading aloud, reading, watching the vedio, etc.) in phonological, semantic and discourse levels is viewed as an efficient method in improving students listening comprehension.