A Study On The Influence Of Topic Familiarity And Vocabulary On Listening Comprehension From The Perspective Of Schema Theory

In the early days of the college English listening study, the focus was mainly on the positive effect of topic familiarity and new words rate on listening comprehension. However, the study combining the two factors has been rare. This research aims to discuss four main research questions:(1)Does new word exert salient effect on listening comprehension? (2) Which factor of topic familiarity and new word exerts more significant effect on listening comprehension? (3)Is there any interaction between topic familiarity and new words?This research conducted an experiment on 65 high school students. The participants in the campus of Cultural Palace have completed new word tests with above 90% accuracy, however, participants in campus of Wensan Road just took the listening tests without any preparation.The test includes two listening passages, familiar and unfamiliar topic. In the pre-listening, each participant completed a topic-familiarity questionnaire. Afterwards, the scores of tests were analyzed by SPSS 19.0. And 8 students were randomly selected to take the immediate recall to further discussion..The results show that new word has a significant effect on listening comprehension, but its influence turns out to be less effective in topic-familiar text. Plus, the influence of new words rate doesn’t acts as a salient factor as topic familiarity. This can be accounted for later analysis that it’s much easier for participants familiar with topic to adopt the interactive processing mode, but that others only with preparation of new words are likely to process incoming information with bottom-up mode with less accurate comprehension. At last, the interaction between topic familiarity and the rate of new words in listening is week, which further confirms the main effects of both on listening comprehension.