Vocational School EFL Listening Teaching: Toward A Systemic Approach Based On Affect And Schema Theories

Along with the development of vocational school EFL teaching in general, vocationalschool EFL listening instruction has made much progress, leading to the enhancement ofstudents’ affect and cognitive ability levels in listening learning. Due to the complexity oflistening instruction and the qualities of teachers and students, vocational school EFLlistening teaching is still suffering from the problem of overemphasis either on affect or oncognition management. Similarly, with the growth of vocational school EFL teaching research,vocational school EFL listening instruction research has made much progress, leading to theadvent of many listening teaching methods. Due to the complexity of the object of study andlimitations of guidelines and theoretical bases, vocational school EFL listening research ishandicapped by the problem of overemphasis either on affect or on cognition managementstudy. It is therefore necessary to explore, on the basis of previous studies, and through anintegrated methodology, a systemic approach to vocational school EFL listening teachingintegrating affect and cognitive ability enhancement.In the light of dialectical systemic thinking, on the basis of relevant affective andcognitive theories such as schema theory, with the results of previous studies as resources, andthrough a rational methodology integrating deduction and induction, this study firstly exploresthe methods for affect and cognition management in listening teaching and formulates anaffect and schema theory based systemic approach to vocational school EFL listeningteaching. The approach comprises three types of strategy. Among them, meta-strategies aremethods for viewing and manipulating the whole approach, especially the other types ofstrategy; affective strategies are techniques for viewing and manipulating the learners’affective factors in EFL listening such as motivation, confidence, and anxiety; and cognitivestrategies are procedures for enhancing the learners’ cognitive ability in EFL listening such asthe schemata of language, content and form.Applying an empirical methodology primarily comprising an experiment, this studysubsequently verifies the effects of the formulated approach on cultivating the learners’affective factors in EFL listening and on enhancing the learners’ cognitive level in EFLlistening. The experiment consists of a pre-survey and pretest, a20-week long period of strategy implementation, and a posttest,taking as its subjects of study90students from acertain vocational school in China, and utilizing EFL listening proficiency tests, appropriateEFL learning affect and schemata questionnaires, Excel2003and SPSS13.0as tools of datacollection and analysis. Results generated from the analysis of data show that the affect andschema theory based systemic approach to vocational school EFL listening teaching hashelped to cultivate the learners’ affective factors in EFL listening and to enhance the learners’cognitive level in EFL listening.This study may be pedagogically valuable as its outcomes are directly applicable tovocational school EFL listening instruction and helpful to solving the present problem ofoveremphasis either on affect or on cognition management. It may also be theoreticallyworthwhile as it may help to overcome the problem in the existing studies of vocationalschool EFL listening teaching of overemphasis either on affect or on cognition managementstudies.