A Study Of The Application Of Schema Theory To English Listening Teaching In Junior Schools

As a basic language skill of the five English learning skills(listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating), listening is used most frequently as an important communication skill, it gradually draws the attention of many foreign language researchers and learners. Now, the listening teaching in junior middle schools in our country is not very satisfying. The reasons are: learners’ lack of interests, native environment of speaking English and the most important is the old model of English listening teaching. For a long time, listening comprehension has been considered as a process of passive and negative reception for external information. However, more and more studies have shown that listening comprehension is actually a process during which active and positive listening is required for listeners. In the listening process, what the listeners want to get is an adequate understanding of what the speakers says and what the speaker means. To attain this purpose, listeners should make good use of background knowledge, decode input information, and reconstruct the information. This paper will discuss how to apply the schema theory to junior middle schools’ English listening teaching and adopt which new teaching mode to improve listening teaching.This paper adopts the empirical research as the research method. There are 52 middle school students involved in the empirical research based on the schema theory for one semester. In the experiment, the author uses the traditional listening teaching method for the controlled class- Class Two, while, in Class Three, the experimental class, the author applies the new teaching mode which is based on the schema theory, i.e. pre-listening lead-in stage, while-listening comprehension stage and post-listening consolidation stage. All activities aim to activate existing schema and build new schema so as to help students improve their English listening comprehension. During the semester, two tests are conducted respectively among the students of these two classes. Through data analysis from SPSS and students’ interview, they have shown that students in Class Three(experimental class) are more interested in listening, and get better habits of listening, so, their listening comprehension is improved greatly. Moreover, students’ cultural background knowledge has been enriched and they are better at meaning reconstruction. They become more active in consciously utilizing listening strategies and interactive information processing mode. Therefore, the use of the schema theory and new listening teaching mode which is based on the schema theory have great influence on English listening teaching in Junior middle schools.