The Application Of Schema Theory To Improving The Return Students’ English Listening Comprehension Ability

The return students of high schools in this paper mainly refer to those who failed to be admitted into the universities because their scores hadn’t reached the enrollment marks. One of the reasons lies in their losing too many points in the listening test. How to improve their listening comprehension ability effectively in a year? The author tries to apply the schema theory to the English listening teaching of a special group, the senior return students, to improve their listening comprehension ability. Taking two classes of the return students in Lianfeng middle school as the subjects of the study, the author designs a teaching process of half a year to analyze the process of improving their listening comprehension ability and the relevant approaches, intended to solve the problems of the return students’ listening.Here is the result of the study:To begin with, the more knowledge the return students have of the content of the listening materials and the rhetorical structure, the better they understand the text. They have learned how to find out the key words and the topic sentences, how to consciously pay more attention to some useful information and obtain some specific information as well. That means they have learned how to make the best of schema in their minds to guide the listening. With the guidance of the schema theory, the listening teaching can not only arouse the students’ subjective initiative and their interests in learning materials, but can also change the focus of listening teaching from focusing more on "words and sentences" to focusing more on "texts". Moreover, the teaching model based on the schema theory can improve their listening ability effectively. Before listening, the teacher takes different measures to introduce the relevant culture, backgrounds and so on. While listening, the students collect the backgrounds initiatively. With some techniques and strategies instructed by the teacher, the students gradually master the means of obtaining and dealing with information. Meanwhile, the relevant backgrounds of the listening texts are correspondingly built in the brain. The students finally learn to make full use of the relevant backgrounds to understand the texts freely. After listening, the teacher consolidates what they have learnt in the listening process in different ways and makes them have the basic skills of listening. In this way, they can not only improve their oral English ability, but also enrich their schema knowledge in their minds. Consequently, their listening comprehension ability can be improved to some degree.Based on the analysis of the specific case, the paper proves that the schema theory has some positive effects on improving the listening comprehension ability of the senior return students. It can be of some guidance to correct some mistakes of the return students’ listening teaching and improve their listening comprehension ability.