An Experimental Study On The Application Of Schema Theory To Teaching English Listening In Senior High School

Listening has been attached to more and more importance in foreign language teaching. Nevertheless, listening is always a difficult and weak point that students may encounter. Behaviorists consider listening comprehension as a passive stimulus-response process, while cognitive psychologists regard listening as an active process. Schema Theory, in the framework of cognitive psychology, is a hot topic in cognitive linguistics. Schema is defined as the “previously acquired knowledge structures”. The application of Schema Theory to listening comprehension usually lays emphasis on the effect of background knowledge in listening comprehension. The activation of schema means that learners can receive some information to predict the content of the coming text, and therefore instill the possible background information from the schema frame to make listening comprehension easier to access. Previous researches proved that pre-listening activities can facilitate second-language listening comprehension, but these researches mainly concentrate on the test of the effect of one or two pre-listening activities on listening comprehension. Nevertheless, there are few researches concerning the comparison of the effectiveness of these pre-listening activities for students of different proficiency levels.Enlightened by the previous researches, in this paper, the author proposes two research questions: the first one is whether the two kinds of pre-listening activities: background information provision, group discussion facilitate learners’ listening performance differently; the second research question is whether the effectiveness of these forms of pre-listening activities is different for learners of high and low proficiency levels.The class-based experiment is about 150 students from NO. 1 Tangxian High School in two proficiency grades Grade A which is regarded as high level group and Grade B as low level group. Then the two groups are further divided into three subgroups where the students have parallel listening ability, which include a control group and two treatment groups to conduct the two pre-listening activities. The statistic analysis is done by employing univariate analysis by SPSS 17.0.The two types of pre-listening activities have different effects on listening comprehension performances. Background information group scored whereas the group discussion has the second scores.These effects of pre-listening activities on listening comprehension vary due to their language proficiency.The results mean that listening teacher should pay attention to pre-listening period and adopt appropriate pre-listening activities due to students’ language proficiency. The task of the students themselves is to accumulate more language knowledge to improve their ability and strengthen their training of listening skills. Meanwhile, students should hunt for more cultural and vocabulary knowledge, try to built the cognitive schemas and cultivate their own listening strategies.