The Research On The Application Of Schema Theory To High School English Listening Class

English listening plays a very important part in the language learning. Listening isthe most important skill among the four basic language skills—listening, speaking,reading and writing. In recent years, more and more second language researchers haverealized the significance of listening comprehension teaching especially the high schoollistening teaching. However, it is probably the most neglected skill in second languageteaching. Listening comprehension used to be thought of as a passive skill, listeners werecalled as “tape-recorder”. But, in fact the listening comprehension process is an activeprocess. During the listening process, what the listener wants to get is an adequateunderstanding of what the speaker said and what the speaker meant. To attain this purpose,the listener should connect to enough background knowledge and depend on manylearning strategies.In view of this kind of problem, the author have accessed to a large amount ofrelevant literature. It is found that the listening comprehension is not pure languageinformation decoding process, but the process with the combination of decoding andmeaning reconstruction. This processing of listening accords with the listening process.So the author attempts to apply schema theory to listening teaching in high school,expects a new hearing schema-oriented teaching methods can improve listeningachievements of high school students.There are five chapters in this paper. Chapter one reviews the background of thepaper, the previous studies of the listening abroad and at home, the current problems inmiddle school listening class. Chapter two mainly introduces the literature review ofschema theory including the definitions of schema theory, types of schema, and functionsof schema in listening comprehension. Chapter three is mainly about experiment and itsdesign. It provides the purpose, the subjects, the materials, and the methods of theexperiment. Chapter four is the pedagogical implications of the schema theory based onthe experiment findings. Chapter five is the conclusions of the paper. Based on the results of the data analysis, we can conclude that a large proportion ofhigh school students are lack of the proper activation of schema theory. The students whohave the better mastering of the schema theory perform superior than the students whohaven’t. Also, applying schema theory to the teaching of listening not only enables thestudents to achieve effective comprehension, but also improves their cross-culturalawareness, which will be beneficial for their later listening experiences.