The Schema-based SEFC Listening Teaching

Listening, speaking, reading and writing are the four basic skills required by the New English Curriculum Standard for Senior High Schools in China (2003) (shortened as the New English Curriculum Standard in the following), among which listening as an essential language input provides a basis for the other three skills in the second language acquisition (SLA) .Better listening has a substantial carry-over to the other three skills. As a rule, the mastery of a foreign language demands a balanced development in these four skills. Important as listening is, however, it was neglected by both teachers and students in senior high schools in China.Fortunately, the New English Curriculum Standard has set the detailed goals of listening teaching in senior high schools. Besides, with listening adopted in NMET at the turn of the century, the importance of listening has been acknowledged nationally. Nevertheless, the result of listening teaching in China is still far from satisfactory mainly due to a lack of an efficient teaching mode under the guidance of a scientific theory.Thus, based on the perspective of cognitive psycholinguistics, the author attempts to apply the Schema Theory to the SEFC listening teaching, explore the relationship between schemata (the plural form of schema) and listening comprehension, and testify whether students' listening capability can be effectively improved through the instruction of the Schema Theory.Consequently, an experiment is carried out in the study and some data are collected through pretests, posttests, mid-term exams and final exams; much invaluable information is obtained through questionnaire surveys and interviews. This study reveals that students have greatly increased their self-confidence and interest in listening and made grand achievements in listening ability after a series of training in the framework of the Schema Theory, which testifies and supports the two assumptions proposed by the author: (I) High school students' listening ability advances greatly through the application of the Schema Theory (2) Linguistic schemata and non-linguistic schemata have different significant influence on students' listening ability, so it is essential for high school teachers to help students enrich and activate their linguistic schemata and non-linguistic schemata simultaneously in the course of their listening teaching practice. The author, therefore, holds a strong belief that this study is of practical as well as theoretical significance in SEFC listening teaching.