Esl Students' English Listening Comprehension Status Quo And Empirical Research Based On The Schema Theory Of Teaching Strategies

Nowadays, listening has played a vital role in the rapidly developing audio era. English communication ability has been particularly highlighted in the background of China's informational convergence with the world. While, the traditional teaching model to promote students' English listening ability is of little help, so in order to satisfy the practical usage requirement, the writer makes some researches, attempting to change the teaching model, event the classroom tasks, to draw out some suggestions for the English listening teaching.Schema is the knowledge structure of the world stored in the long-term memory, which will be associated with and provide knowledge basis when people process new information. Schema theory claims that listening comprehension is not a passive process, but a process in which listeners work positively and consistently adjust the background knowledge in their mind to strengthen their understanding of the input information and then reconstruct it. The relevant knowledge in the listeners'mind will evoke their motivation for listening. The familiar context will help listeners make predictions of the content, effectively understand the words, phrases and sentences and adjust the understanding. And, finally, based on the previous knowledge the new information is fully understood by the listeners and becomes part of the knowledge structure in the listeners'mind for future use. Schemata can be classified into three categories, namely, linguistic schema, content schema and formal schema. According to the cognitive psychology, listening comprehension is an interactive-compensatory cognitive process, in which the bottom-up and top-down comprehension model work together in every understanding phase. It sticks out the importance of the schema theory to English listening teaching and demonstrate that students' English listening comprehension is closely related to the schema construction and activation. In this paper, the writer makes two experiments for English listening teaching, which prove the college English listening teaching based on the schema theory is more effective than the traditional one. It also manifests that the activated extra schema doesn't exert hindrance on students'listening comprehension, which ensures us to help the students activate and construct as much knowledge structure as time permits in the class.In the end, writer draws some teaching implication from this paper. First, the respective traditional role of teachers and students should be changed. Secondly, teachers should no longer pay attention to what to teach but to how to teach. Thirdly, it's proved that listening is closely related to reading. Lastly, listening strategy instruction should be carried out in the class. The conclusion part of this paper summarizes the research results of this paper, pointes out its limitation and states writer's expectation that this paper may be of little help to those who will make further research in to this filed.