A Study Of English Majors' Listening Comprehension Based On The Schema Theory

For a very long time,English listening has always been one of the problems for students,even for many English majors.Although students have a good command of vocabulary and grammar,they still cannot get a good score in English listening tests.This study is based on the schema theory and aims to explore four questions: 1)To what extent do English majors use the schema theory to solve the problems during their listening comprehension? 2)Is the non-linguistic schema used more often than the linguistic schema by the students ? 3)Does the lack of background knowledge hinder the students' listening comprehension? 4)Does the topic familiarity affect the students' listening comprehension?The subjects of the study are 30 sophomores majoring in English from Qingdao University of Science and Technology.The study adopts both quantitative method and qualitative method.1)The English listening questionnaire is mainly intended to investigate students' attitudes towards English listening,to find their problems in listening comprehension and their habits in the listening process,to know whether they have the awareness of schema theory,and to differentiate their use of the schema theory;2)The listening comprehension test is used to evaluate their listening comprehension ability;3)The topic familiarity questionnaire aims to explore whether students are familiar with the topics in the listening comprehension test,which can help the author to find out whether the topic familiarity influence learners' listening comprehension or not.4)The interview is for the author to know more clearly students' awareness of the schema theory and their attitudes towards applying the schema theory for English listening.Based on the data analysis and discussion,four major findings are concluded: 1)English majors use the schema theory frequently during their listening comprehension,whether consciously or unconsciously.2)It is hard to tell which one is used more often between the non-linguistic schema and the linguistic schema by the English majors,because all three types of the schema are very helpful to their listening comprehension.3)A lack of background knowledge seriously hinders the students' listening comprehension.4)The topic familiarity affects the students' listening comprehension.To be specific,topic familiarity in students' listening has a significantly positive correlation with their listening scores.These findings offer some implications to English listening teaching and learning in the future.