A Study On The Application Of Schema Theory To English Listening Teaching In Junior High School

As we all know, there are four skills in English learning(listening, speaking, reading and writing). It was reported that listening is the weakest aspect among the four skills for students in China. Listening is difficult to control, and also some teachers consider it as a passive procedure for students to accept the information. As a result, students’ listening competence is not satisfying. However, listening becomes more and more important,considering the reformation of the high school entrance examination. Therefore, most of teachers lay more focus on the instruction of English listening.Therefore,it is necessary to find an effective approach to enhance students’ listening proficiency. The thesis aims to put the schema theory into English listening teaching in Junior high school to alleviate students’ listening anxiety and improve students’ listening scores.The research questions are summarized as follow:(1) Can schema theory activation applied into the English listening teaching alleviate the learners’ listening anxiety?(2) Can schema contribute to students’ listening scores in junior middle school?In this thesis, the author employs experimental research, questionnaires and interviews. The participants were students, who came from two classes of Grade Eight in Shenyang Bocai Junior High school as control class and experimental class respectively.The teaching experiment has lasted nearly three months. The traditional instruction was applied into control class and the schema theory was adopted in the experiment class. All data came from the pre-test, the post test, the questionnaires and the interviews for students.All the collected data are analyzed by SPSS 17.0.This thesis attempts to help teachers achieve a better understanding of the schema theory and its effect on improving English reading in senior high school. By the compared results between the control class and experimental class, the conclusion can be drawn that the English listening anxiety can be alleviated by schema. What’s more, the schema theory can contribute to students’ listening scores in junior high school. In general, the author believes that this study is helpful for English listening teaching in junior middle school. At the same time, it has both theoretical and practical values in foreign language teaching.