A Study On English Listening Schema Strategy Training Of Senior English Students

As the primary means of language input, listening plays a key role in the perception and learning of language. Listening is regarded as an important means as well as the main purpose of language learning. High School English Curriculum Standard (2003) pointed out that the ultimate goal of language learning in high school is to foster students’communicative abilities, among which listening is an important component. The improvement of students listening skills can benefit other language skills. Therefore it is significant to develop students" listening competence. However at present, English listening teaching in high school is often ignored, whose negative effect should draw our attention. Based on the students’listening ability and the requirements of the New Curriculum Standard, the author seeks to argue for the great necessity and effectiveness of the schema theory and for its practical application in classroom listening teaching.Taking the cognitive psychology of schema theory as the starting point, this paper expounds the promoting function of schema theory on listening comprehension, considering that listening learners should construct and arouse related schema to understand listening materials, so as to improve students’listening ability by using some appropriate listening strategies based on schema theory, this paper contains four research questions.1) What is students’overall situation of using schema listening strategy?2) Is there any correlation between schema listening strategy and English learning achievements?3) What are the schema listening strategies that are appropriate to students?4) What is the effect after schema strategy training?In this research both quantitative and qualitative studies were adopted.Two questionnaires, two listening tests and an interview were carried out in high school sophomore students. On the basis of schema theory, the author conducted an experiment in four classes with similar listening ability in a high school. This experiment lasted for18weeks. And the classes were divided into two grounds randomly. Two classes were selected as experimental class which was applied schema theory in listening teaching; the other two classes were selected as control class which was applied traditional teaching method. By analyzing the result of listening test at the end of the experiment, this paper found that the listening performance of students in experimental class has been significantly improved relatively, compared with that of students in control class. And according to the questionnaire survey, and the result of the interview, the students in the experimental class have been aware of the importance of schema theory in listening comprehension and in the habit of using some strategies in listening practice. Through this experiment, this paper gets the conclusion that the application of schema theory has positive effect on improving students’listening comprehension ability in high school.The author also presents the limitations of the research, for example, the size of the research is too small, and enough time is not given to the research and so on. The research has provided positive implications for English listening teaching in high schools, and more attention is to be called on further research.