A Study Of English Listening Teaching In Senior High School Based On Schema Theory

As an important communication and language skill, listening plays an irreplaceable role in daily communication and language teaching. Also, listening comprehension has been a part of English test. However, listening teaching in senior high school has been underemphasized for a long time, and listening skill has become the weak link of the four language skills(namely listening, speaking, reading and writing). The lack of appropriate listening materials, listening strategies and systematic language training can explain the listening teaching problems, but the most important reason is the out-of-date listening teaching mode. The traditional listening teaching mode—explain new words, listen to the recording, do the exercise and check the answer—cannot present a complete teaching process, which lacks of warm-up and consolidation stage. Moreover, the monotonous listening practice cannot arouse students’ interest, which leads to the low level of listening ability.Schema refers to the structural knowledge stored in listeners’ mind, including linguistic schema, content schema and formal schema. When dealing with new information, listeners’ tend to interact with prior knowledge to predict, infer, integrate and understand the new knowledge. According to schema theory, listening comprehension is an active process of interaction between prior knowledge and new information instead of a process of passive reception. During this process, listeners need use top-down mode and bottom-up mode to decode the information and reconstruct the meaning. The combination of new information with related background knowledge can reduce the difficulty and increase accuracy in listening comprehension. Obviously, listeners could have a better understanding of listening materials if they have sufficient schema that has been stored in their mind.In this thesis, schema theory is applied into listening teaching to solve the above problems. The author designed a feasible teaching plan, including constructing linguistic knowledge and formal knowledge, enriching cultural, social, scientific knowledge and common sense of life. Besides, the author designed specific listening activities to activate prior schema in pre-listening, construct new schema in while-listening and consolidate new schema in post-listening. The teacher helps students build a connection between prior knowledge and new knowledge to facilitate listening comprehension, and helps students integrate the new knowledge to enlarge their prior knowledge. This study contains three research questions:(1) What are the problems of current listening teaching?(2) How to apply schema theory into listening teaching?(3) Could schema-theory-based teaching mode change the defective situation of listening teaching and improve students’ listening comprehension ability effectively?In order to testify the efficiency of listening teaching based on schema theory, action research is adopted. The subjects of the research are 30 Senior One students who are involved in this teaching practice for 18 weeks. The purpose of the practice is to arouse students’ interest, improve listening ability and make some changes of the current situation of listening teaching by using the new teaching mode. The instruments of the research include listening tests, questionnaires and interviews. First, the author has an interview with English teachers to find the listening teaching problems initially. Then pre-test and pre-questionnaire are conducted in the first class. According to the analysis of the collected data, the author reconfirms the problems. Second, the new teaching mode based on schema theory is adopted in listening teaching. Third, a mid-interview is conducted after the mid-term examination to modify the teaching plan based on students’ feedback. Last, a post- test and post-interview are conducted at the eighteenth week, and the results of post-test and post-interview are compared with previous results. The final results indicate that schema-theory-based teaching method can stimulate students’ interest in listening study, enrich students’ linguistic knowledge and non-linguistic knowledge, improve the ability of using listening strategy and cultivate the ability of self-directed learning and self-reflection. All in all, schema theory provides reference for listening teaching in senior high school.