Application Of Schema Theory To The Teaching Of English Listening In Senior High Schools

Mastering a language always starts with listening. However, most of the senior highschools follow a simple fixed listening teaching mode-“play the tapes, do the exercise andcheck the answers”. Students who are only viewed as passive receivers will gradually losetheir heart in listening under this listening mode. According to the schema theory, listeningcomprehension is an interacted process between listeners’ existing schema knowledge and thelistening materials. Only completely activating and applying their existing schema knowledgecan they better understand the new content.This study draws the research achievements about the application of schema theory tolistening teaching from home and abroad. The research purpose lies in applying schematheory to listening teaching in senior high schools by concrete teaching cases, and thenobserving the effect of applying this mode to optimize teachers’ teaching and improvestudents’ listening skills.In order to make the teachers and students concretely and deeply understand thecombination of the schema theory with listening comprehension, a linguistic schema samplelesson, a content schema sample lesson and a formal schema sample lesson are designed todemonstrate what they should do in the three stages. Through reading a large number ofmaterials, the author finds that the best way of applying schema theory to English listeningteaching is to divide a listening lesson into three stages, namely activating schema(pre-listening), building schema (while-listening) and consolidating schema (post-listening).Therefore, the author tries to explore how to activate schema in pre-listening, establishschema in while-listening and consolidate schema in post-listening through specific teachingcases so as to discuss the application of schema theory in the listening teaching in senior highschools. Finally in order to verify the effect of this mode, questionnaires about the effect ofapplying schema theory to listening teaching are designed and the subjects are from the ThirdMiddle school in Xiangtan city. It concludes that the application of schema theory to Englishlistening teaching can improve students’ interest in learning English, vivify classroom atmosphere and cultivate their comprehensive language abilities on the basis of listening.