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

Listening,as a language input,is one of the essential language skills in SLA(second language acquisition).People get information in daily communication mainly through listening.With the new policy of the college entrance examination,listening comprehension will be included in English test in many areas from 2016.However,students in senior high school are still poor in listening because it has been ignored for a long term in senior high school,and traditional teaching method as “play recording-listen-check answers-play again” is lack of theoretical guidance.Schema refers to the structural knowledge stored in listeners' mind,including linguistic schema,content schema and formal schema.Listening comprehension is the process of processing information.According to schema theory,listener tends to activate the pre-existent knowledge to predict and understand the new information,so as to build new schema.Relevance theory thinks that language communication is a cognize-inference process.Researchers from home and abroad have done the researches on the schema or relevance theory in listening,and the study shows that they are of great help to the ESL learners' English listening ability,they are complementary.However few researches applied the two theories together in senior high school teaching,while lots of the research subjects are college students in English major.Therefore,in this thesis schema theory and relevance theory are applied into the three periods of listening teaching(pre-listening,while-listening,and post-listening),in order to search for an effective teaching mode in senior high school.This thesis firstly introduces schema theory and relevance theory,then reviews the study of listening comprehension from home and abroad.Based on schema theory and relevance theory,the subjects of the study are 60 Senior Two students in two classes from a middle school in Shaanxi province.This teaching process will last for twelve weeks.Three instruments were adopted in this research,pre-test and post-test,post-interview,and SPSS13.0 was used to analyze the data.At the beginning of the research,a listening test was used to show that the two classes have the same level of listening.Then took one of the classes asexperimental class,the other as control class.In the experimental class,teacher applied the schema theory and relevance theory-based teaching method in listening lessons to enrich students' linguistic schema,content schema and formal schema,and practiced their inferential ability,encouraged them to use both the two theories.Meanwhile,teacher acted as the organizer,participant,and guide in teaching process.And in control class,the traditional teaching method was applied as usual.The final result shows that compared with traditional teaching method,schema theory and relevance theory-based listening teaching method are more effective,which increases students' interest of listening,enriches their listening strategies,and decreases anxiety in exam.