The Application Of Schema Theory To Listening Comprehension Teaching In Junior Middle Schools

Listening is a vital component of the English language teaching and learning and provides the base for the growth of reading, writing, and speaking abilities. Listening comprehension is an active process. In the process, what the listener wants to get is an adequate understanding of what the speaker says and what the speaker means. To attain this purpose, the listener has to utilize background knowledge, contextual clues and depend on many learning strategies. Active listener will understand what the speaker says with relevant background knowledge and his particular purpose.The current situation of the teaching of junior middle school English listening in China is still unsatisfactory. In junior middle school English listening class, the teaching of listening is often characterized by explaining new words and grammatical knowledge. In the listening process, students are often viewed as passive receivers. This way of teaching severely frustrates students'initiative and restrains the students' interest and creativity.In view of these kinds of problems, this thesis takes up the guidance of schema theory to the teaching of English listening as the research focus. Schema theory holds the view that listeners'background knowledge plays a key role in understanding a new text. According to schema theory, listening comprehension is an interactive model, which includes bottom-up and top-down models. Listeners use both bottom-up and top-down approaches to interpret listening message. In listening comprehension process, listeners should make their background knowledge active and use the knowledge to interpret the new text. The listener's schemata determine what he comprehends, how well he comprehends, and whether he can comprehend at all. In order to justify the role schema plays in listening comprehension in junior middle school and explore effective ways to improve students'English listening comprehension, the author conducts two listening tests and a questionnaire survey in this research. The participants of the research are from Wufeng Middle School.The results of the study reveal that listening teaching shouldn't be focused only on the decoding of linguistic knowledge (vocabulary, grammar rules, syntactic structures, etc.) The lack of socio-cultural, factual, and contextual knowledge of the target language may also present an obstacle to listening comprehension. What can not be denied is that the supplement of related background knowledge (construction of schemata) or the possession of related background knowledge (activation of schemata) can actively facilitate listening comprehension. Another finding is that poor listening strategies, the lack of pre-listening preparation and listeners'weak learning motivation, etc. are also factors affecting the learners'listening performance.Some pedagogical implications for listening teaching are drawn through the above research and discussion. In order to achieve successful listening, the teachers should emphasize pre-listening preparation, including: teaching new words, providing relative background knowledge, trying to activate the students'prior knowledge, constructing non.-existed schemata, stimulating students'motivation for listening, etc. In teaching practice, teachers should consciously cultivate the students' listening strategies and foster the students' learning autonomy, etc. Besides, in order to accumulate the learners'storage of world knowledge (or schemata), the teachers should also emphasize large quantities of comprehensible input. It is hoped that this study will shed light on English listening teaching in junior middle schools...