An Investigation Into Listening Teaching Of English Majors In Secondary Vocational Schools

In modern foreign language teaching, due attention isn't not paid to listening as the other three skills including speaking, reading and writing. It is the Cinderella skill in second language teaching (David Nunan, 2001). There exist critical situations both in listening learning and in listening teaching in Secondary Vocational Schools in China ---- listening teaching and learning is time-consuming and low effective. The state quo of listening teaching in Secondary Vocational Schools in China is not optimistic. It's no surprise to find that the students who have received several years of formal English learning, very often remain deficient in understanding the listening input. Some students, in the long run, do not grasp the proper knowledge at all, which is vital for them to comprehend listening materials. All these give rise to their insufficient schema in their minds, which leads to poor listening ability. Facing the critical situation, this thesis probes listening teaching in Secondary Vocational Schools by adopting schema theory in an effort to facilitate the students listening comprehension.In recent years a significant amount of research has been conducted by second language researchers that comprehension is enhanced when schema or prior knowledge is activated. Schema theory is a relatively new psychological term. It was proposed by Bartlett in the 1930s, developed and perfected by Rumelhart. Since schema theory was put forward formally by Bartlett in 1932 (Anderson & Pearson, 1984), more attention was paid to it and great interest was sparked. Many researchers abroad and at home devoted their time to the research of schema theory and gradually applied the theory into practice. The achievements done by the researchers both abroad and at home reveal that with the help of schemata, the information input can be easily reconstructed and well comprehended thus facilitating listening comprehension. During the process of listening, if the actual event does conform to our background knowledge (Schema), the mind supplies such information automatically from the background script in its memory. Hence the listening materials can be comprehended quickly.The aim of this thesis is to probe listening teaching in Secondary Vocational Schools by adopting schema theory in an effort to facilitate the students listening...