The Application Of Schema Theory To English Listening Comprehension Teaching In Senior High School

English listening immediately drew attention of most senior high school teachers and students when it formally became part of English paper of the College Entrance Examination in 2001. But most students lose their marks of English listening despite its important percentage. Therefore, more and more people are paying much more attention to the listening comprehension teaching. However, the current teaching in this field in China is not satisfying, as many problems still exist. Professor Wangzhongyan once said: "In listening classes, it's not unusual that teachers just play records without offering any hints." During the listening practice, listeners are only viewed as passive receiver without any suggestion and explanation of the relevant background knowledge. After listeners listen once or twice, teachers just check the answers and then play the tape sentence by sentence. This kind of listening teaching is more like testing listening comprehension than like developing students' listening strategies and skills.In view of the problems mentioned above, this paper takes up the schema theory as the guidance to the listening teaching, studies the effects brought by backgroud knowledge and develops a more efficient English listening teaching mode through the systematic instructional design and the practice of English listening teaching, that is the Schema Theory-based Teaching Mode of English Listening. Both Bartlett (1932), the first user of the term schema, and Rumelhart (1980) hold the view that listeners' background knowledge plays a key role in the understanding of new information. The previously acquired knowledge is the listeners' backgroud knowledge which includes all the knowledge that the listener learned before, such as linguistic knowledge, social knowledge, cultural knowledge, common sense and so on. These previously required knowledge structures which are stored in the brain are called Schemata. According to schema theory, the listening process is a process in which listeners' previously acquired schemata interact with the input information. Only when listeners activate and make full use of the previously acquired knowledge can they understand the new information. Therefore, the Schema Theory is significant in guiding the teaching of senior high school English listening. At first, this paper reviews the process and characteristics of the listening comprehension, making it clear what the task of the senior high school English listening is. Then it reviews the current status of the English listening comprehension teaching in senior high school as well as the main problems. It also gives a brief introduction to Schema Theory and listening teaching, and the roles that the Schemata plays on listening comprehension. At last, the author designs a Schema Theory-based Teaching Mode of English Listening and proves the efficiency of the Mode through the teaching practice.