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

As a basic skill of language learning,listening involves more than an isolated and passive process of comprehension and listeners are required to actively make use of their own background knowledge to understand the real intention of speakers.Junior high school students are in a key period of learning English.If teachers neglect to activate,enrich and consolidate the students’ schemata in listening teaching,it will result in affecting students’ listening comprehension as well as going against the development of students’ listening proficiency.It is an issue worthy of exploring that how schema theory can be applied to English listening teaching in junior high school to promote students’ listening grade and listening ability.To probe into whether schema theory can facilitate the quality of the English listening teaching in junior high school,a study is conducted in the author’s internship school and the research participants are selected from two parallel classes of Grade Seven.By adopting questionnaire,listening test and interview with students,this study aims to answer the following questions.(1)Can the English listening scores of the junior high school students be improved to some degree under the listening teaching based on schema theory?(2)Will both the boy group and the girl group in the experimental class get higher English listening scores after the experiment? If yes,are there any differences between the two groups?(3)What are the influences of the schema-based listening teaching model on the listening learning attitude and the listening ability of junior high school students?The research findings are as follows.Firstly,the listening teaching model based on schema theory can improve students’ listening scores to certain degree in junior high school.Secondly,both the boy group and the girl group in the experimental classachieve higher listening scores after the experiment,in which the boy group makes relatively greater progress.Thirdly,the schema-guided listening teaching model in junior high school enables students to become more interested in listening learning and more active in listening lessons.Besides,students are able to command more listening skills and strategies.It can be demonstrated from the research results and findings that the listening teaching model based on schema theory can promote the English listening teaching quality in junior high school.Integrating schema theory into listening teaching will not only be beneficial for teachers in junior high schools to consciously cultivate students’ preferable listening habits in listening classroom,but also be helpful in improving students’ listening ability and English comprehensive quality.