The Application Of Schema Theory To College English Listening Teaching With Authentic Materials

Listening is one of the most basic skills of language learning and recently there has been a lot of progress in English listening teaching in China. However for some of the college students, they will not rest on their present achievement of English listening competence. They desire to listen to materials of authenticity in order to improve their true listening ability. Despite of their good wishes to comprehend the authentic materials, they are often frustrated in listening to them, because they find it hard to follow the speakers. One of the reasons for this lies in the difference between the first language and second language in the real-life setting. Furthermore students have been affected by the examination-oriented education system and they are used to listening to the inauthentic materials and rarely have the chance to listen to the authentic material in class.There have been some researches on application of schema theory to listening teaching but few of them concern listening teaching with authentic materials. Therefore this thesis is intended primarily for finding out the effect of schema theory on the improvement of listening comprehension of authentic materials. The research questions are:(1) Does the application of schema theory to listening teaching help improve learner's comprehension of authentic materials? (2) How does schema theory take effect with regard to authentic materials of different topics?An experiment was conducted to reach this end.60 subjects, who are non-English major freshmen in Peizheng College, took part in the experiment.30 of them were in the control class and 30 were in the experimental class. A questionnaire consisting of 20 questions was used to find out what problems students have in listening to authentic materials and whether they use schema theory in the listening process. Both control class and experimental class took a pre-test to find out whether subjects of both classes were of similar English listening proficiency. The post-test comprised three authentic materials. After different treatments, the post-test was used to find out whether subjects scored significantly differently in listening to authentic materials.The same authentic materials were used in both classes but different methods were employed in teaching. In the experimental class, the author gave lectures on schema theory and differences between authentic and inauthentic materials respectively. Besides different tasks were designed to help build up the subjects' linguistic schema, content schema and formal schema. And because of the important role of content schema, much emphasis was placed on activating subjects' background knowledge. Their background knowledge was activated, built up and consolidated in there stages of listening, which are the pre-listening stage, while-listening stage and the post-listening stage. While in the control class, the traditional teaching methods were followed. Teaching tasks mainly focused on vocabulary teaching and sentence analysis afterwards.The data analyzed by SPSS 13.0 indicated that after certain treatment of familiarization of schema, the experimental class had made a significant improvement while control class had got comparatively lower scores. This result suggests that the application of schema theory to listening teaching exerts positive effect on improvement of comprehension of authentic materials. Furthermore it is also noted that the effect of schema varies on different topics of the authentic materials. In the case of absent schema, activities of building up new schemata are indispensible. While if necessary schemata already exist in listeners' minds, these schemata will be activated either consciously or subconsciously whether or not listeners have received extra treatment of activation of the present schemata.Schema theory has many implications for the teaching authentic listening. Firstly it's advisable to build up listeners' linguistic, content and formal schemata through elaborate teaching activities. Secondly suitable authentic materials should be chosen in accordance with the authenticity principles. Thirdly authentic materials should be used systematically and thus to reach positive teaching effects in the long run.