The Application Of Schema Theory In English Listening Teaching

Listening is a vital component of the English language teaching and learning and provides the base for the growth of reading, writing, and speaking abilities. However, the current teaching of college English listening in China is not satisfying. In college English listening class, the teaching of listening is often characterized by explaining new words and grammatical knowledge. In the listening process, students are often viewed as passive receivers. This way of teaching severely frustrates students' initiative and restrains the students' interest and creativity. This kind of English listening instruction is far from developing students' competence of listening, and it also does not benefit the improvement of the listening comprehension competence of the listeners. In view of the current status of the college English listening class, it is necessary to reform the inefficient teaching methods and research and to explore a scientific and efficient mode of English listening instruction.Listening, just like reading, was believed to be a passive one-way comprehensive process. However, with the development of language teaching, listening comprehension is found to be an interactive process of two-way communication, during which listeners' background knowledge play an important role. Schema theory lays theoretical foundation for this explanation. It claims that listening comprehension is an interactive process between listeners' linguistic knowledge, background knowledge and the incoming information. Whether listeners can understand new information depends to a large degree on how much background knowledge they have activated. Therefore, the Schema Theory is significant in guiding instruction of college English listening.This paper intends to explore how university English teachers can apply Schema Theory in listening classes. The thesis reviews the current status of college English listening instruction at first. Then it gives a brief introduction of Schema Theory and listening teaching, and indicates the impact of schemata on listening comprehension. Based on this, the author designs a Schema Theory-based Teaching Mode of English Listening, that is a framework of pre-listening, during-listening and post-listening activities for classroom listening teaching. This mode aims to improve reasonably and effectively college English listening teaching and the students' listening competence. During the writing of this thesis, the author also organizes a three-month experiment. The thesis collects the data from the experiments to prove the effectiveness of the teaching mode. Based on the above experimental analysis and conclusion, the author proved that the Schema Theory-based Teaching Mode of English Listening is more efficient than the traditional ones in college English listening instruction.