Effects Of Different Content Schema On Chinese Students' Listening Strategy

The traditional listening classes often ignore the preparation of the background information and lack the cultivation of the listening strategies.As a result,students are not able to be actively involved in the listening activities.Listening processing is essentially a procedure of listening in which the listeners use their acquired language knowledge and existing background information to comprehend the second language.It needs the listeners' perception,parsing and utilization to actively decode the sound information.According to Schema Theory,schema plays a vital role in the listening processing to handle the information.Schema is classified into three groups: content schema,linguistic schema and formal schema.Schema can be the cultural background knowledge,the personal experiences in daily life,the language knowledge and the discourse knowledge of the listeners.Meanwhile,listeners can use listening strategies to help to comprehend the meaning.O'Malley et al classified it into three groups: metacognitive strategy,cognitive strategy and social/affective strategy.A large number of studies have shown that listeners not only need to use language knowledge to understand discourse,but also need to constantly activate a large number of schema in their minds to actively and effectively understand the information with the help of listening strategy.This thesis discusses the features of the listening strategy use of Chinese university English majors at different proficiency levels and with different content schema activated,as well as the characteristics of the information processing patterns in listening comprehension of Chinese university English majors at different proficiency levels and with different content schema.In this study,Eight Chinese English majors are grouped into different language proficiency level groups to investigate their strategy use and information processing patterns in two listening passages with different topics which can activate different level of content schema.There are four major findings:(1)The result has shown that the higher level of content schema can make the listeners use the listening strategies more effectively,and connect their prior knowledge to comprehend.(2)Sufficient content schema can enable the high level learners to use the listening strategy to test their own speculation and can improve the confidence and enthusiasm of the lower level students to improve comprehension.(3)When lack of adequate content schema,the high level students can still use their listening strategies flexibly and effectively to help them understand,but they will reduce the frequency of using the listening strategy to test and confirm their guessing.The weak language ability of the middle and low level students will make them more dependent on listening strategies,unable to use some strategies effectively,and even cause failure of understanding and emotional control.(4)The more familiar topic can activate more content schema in one's mind and make the students use the top-down and interactive processing more easily.And the low content schema makes the students more dependent on bottom-up processing.Therefore,the teaching of background information and listening strategy should be more stressed to promote the activation of the schema to help listening.