Developing High School Students' Listening Ability With The Aid Of Background Knowledge

How to develop high school students' listening ability has long been a heated argument in English teaching and research at home and abroad. High school students often find that the listening skill is the most difficult of all the four basic language skills. Although listening and reading are both receptive skills, usually students are able to do better in reading comprehension than they do in listening comprehension in the integrative English examinations. In this paper we investigate the question of how effectively different listening conditions can assist high school students in the process of listening comprehension. In particular, we will study how background knowledge can provide aid to students in listening comprehension.The present paper is made up of six parts. Part One starts with a brief introduction to the aims and significance of this study, including the present listening teaching situation in most parts of China and the proposed benchmarks of listening skills for level VIII, which is revised by the Ministry of Education for senior grade III students in ordinary senior high schools. In Part Two, we present the representative achievements in listening teaching and research at home and abroad, and the reason why this study is of great necessity at present. The third part mainly introduces the schema theory, which will provide support to this study.Part Four is involved in the present study. We first advance the two hypotheses, then provide some information in detail concerning the testees and design, materials and scoring as well as the procedure and the results in this study. Part Five, based on the results and the analysis in Part Four, draws two conclusions to improve high school students' listening ability in future. The paper ends with Part Six, which contains the practical and theoretical implications, and at the same time points out the limitation of this study.After we administered four listening tests and analyzed the numerical data, this dissertation supports the following hypotheses: (l)High school students who complete a listening exercise that contains an aid of background knowledge will do better than those who receive no aid. (2) Language knowledge and content knowledge have different influence on students' listening ability respectively, so the accumulation of language schemata is as important as that of content schemata in high school listening learning.