The Correlation Study Between The Schema Activation And The Listening Comprehension Outcome And Its Implications For Testing Design Of Listening Discourse

Listening is a vital component of the English language learning and provides the base forgrowth in reading, writing, and speaking abilities. However, it continues to be underratedin many ways and thus remains one of the least understood processes as a research focus.Therefore, much has to be done to reveal the secret of listening comprehension.Research on schema theory provides very useful theoretic basis for examining listeningcomprehension. In the past, listening was considered as a simple one-way flow ofinformation to the brain after a sound is heard. But according to schema theory, listeningis an interactive process of two-way communication during which the listener'sbackground knowledge plays an important role. Lacking of schema is an important factorresponsible for the inefficiency of listening comprehension. Thus, the failure tocomprehend a text does not necessarily due to the lack of vocabulary or grammaticalknowledge. More often than not, it is the lack of background knowledge that blocks theconceptually driven process, making it difficult to carry on two-way communication tounderstand listening text.This thesis explores how listening comprehension in general, and listening test design inparticular, can benefit from schema theory. In order to find out the correlation betweenthe schema activation and the comprehension outcome, three studies of different natureare undertaken. Firstly, a preliminary study is carried out to test the hypothesis thatlisteners with high linguistic proficiency level will usually show a superior listeningcomprehension outcome. Result shows that high degree in linguistic proficiency does notnecessarily correspond with high scores in listening tests, which implies that listeningcomprehension is not simply a function of language proficiency. There must be someother factors that contribute to successful listening apart from the linguistic factor. Then,a survey study is conducted to examine the impact of listener's existed schema on thelistening comprehension. Questionnaires and think-aloud methods are applied. The dataare collected by means of theoretical sampling and are analyzed by means of bothqualitative and quantitative research. Result shows that for topic-centered passage, thecorrelation between the schema activation and the comprehension outcome is high.Listeners with high schema activation degree usually have superior comprehension thanthose who have lower activation degree. Then, under the belief that students'comprehension can be enhanced by making them familiar with the schema, another studyis conducted, which is based on the hypothesis that listeners who have been familiarizedwith the key schema will get better score than those who haven't. The data collectedindicates that in comparison with their pre-test results, the prepared group which isfamiliarized with certain key schema made significant improvement while thenon-prepared group got a lower score, which suggests that familiarization with the keyschemata does prepare listeners for comprehension.Based upon the body of research, some guidelines for constructing listening test areprovided from the schematic perspective as to how to screen texts, how to design tasksand how to decide the appropriate difficulty level of a listening text.