The Application Of Schema Theory In College English Listening Teaching

English listening ability is a comprehensive ability which requires relativelyhigh skills. Therefore, teaching English listening has always been a difficult jobfor EFL instructors. According to College English Curriculum Requirementsissued by the Ministry of Education, its goal aims at cultivating students’ Englishcomprehensive application ability, especially listening and speaking skills. In thepast, we focused more on the memorization of new words, the usage of grammarand the exercises of tone in the English listening class. This study aims atexperimenting with the background knowledge of listening content, which iscalled schema theory. That is, students are expected to improve their listeningcomprehension on the basis of their previous cultural and linguistic knowledge.This paper mainly focuses on the following three questions:1) whetherschema theory has a positive impact on teaching English listening.2) whetherschema theory can help improve the students listening grades and3).if so whichtypes of questions can be improved most significantly.This study employs such research methods as variable-control experiment,test, questionnaire, and interview. The subjects were freshmen English majorsfrom two different classes in the same university in Xi’an. The experimental classwas taught with the application of the schema theory the other class, the controlclass, was taught without using the schema theory. In pre-listening stage, theobjectives of the experimental class were to activate the students’ previousschema in their mind and then to enrich or build the new one. At while-listeningstage, according to the previously activated schema in pre listening stage they canverify and modify the material. At post listening stage students can strengthen andevaluate their schema theory in their mind. Through these three stages in a spiral,the students are expected to improve their listening skills step by stepunconsciously.Through the analysis of students’ interviews, questionnaire survey and thecomparison between the experimental group and control group, can be safelyconcluded that schema theory can have a positive effect on the students’cognition in while listening. Secondly, it can also help filtrate the uselessinformation and memory of the relevant information. To make sure theirreplaceable impact of schema theory in teaching listening, more studies areneeded in the future. No matter for students and teachers there is no doubt thatschema theory is productive and it need to be improved.