A Schematic Approach To The Teaching Of English Listening

With China's entering into the WTO and opening its markets to the outside world, the demand for English is greater and greater in many areas. Listening (as a basic skill of English education) plays an important role in the whole process of English learning of students. According to the New National Standard for English Curriculum, the purpose of English teaching in senior middle school is to improve the students'four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing. As we all know that listening is the most way of gaining information, so people should pay more attention to listening. But unfortunately, in modern foreign language teaching, listening is the Cinderella skill in second language teaching (David Nunan, 2001), and is not paid to due attention., especially in Secondary vocational School, we see that current English listening teaching is not satisfactory. The traditional English teaching model is obsolete, teachers are lack of teaching strategies, mainly depending on playing the recorder, checking the answers and asking students to listen repeatedly, seldom supplying students with listening contents, related hints and explanations of background knowledge, students become passive receivers in the listening process. To the students, most of them are lower in English listening level; even more, they have not enough linguistic knowledge, grammar and cultural background knowledge too. Thus, in order to obtain good effects of listening teaching and improve listening comprehension, it is necessary to study an effective teaching model, and teach some listening strategies to the students. But to reach the goals, learners are required to be trained necessarily in the application of listening strategies based on some language theory.Recent years, the research on listening teaching theory has made great progress, second language researchers studied that activation of schema is advantageous to the improvement of listening comprehension. Researches have also shown that the accumulation of schemata contributes most to efficient comprehension and retention of new listening material that are getting more difficult as students progress along the way (Rumelhart, 1997). The role of schemata in listening comprehension is acknowledged by Rost (2002) when he stated that the listener has multiple sources of information. Bartlett employed the term"schema"to refer to the basic unit in the organization of prior knowledge. According to Anderson and Pearson (1984), the early 20th century greatest psychologists (Wertheimer, Kohler, Wulf among them) also contributed to the development of schema theory.Compared with the studies on schema theory abroad, studies on learning strategies in China are more focused on introduction and description of listening strategies theoretically, and many Chinese educators and teachers began the researches and experiments are on the English teaching in the College or university seldom in the Secondary Vocational School (SVS).Above the problems and phenomena, the author,by reviewing the historical study of schema theory abroad and in China, stating the active functions of schema theory on listening comprehension, and systematic designing of teaching model in English listening practice, proposes a more effective listening teaching model based on schema theory aiming at improving students'listening comprehension, and which is the writing purpose of the thesis too.In this study, the author's hypothesis are 1) Secondary vocational school students are able to master schema theory knowledge through being trained with the new English listening teaching model 2) The new English listening teaching model proposed based on the schema theory is more effective than traditional model in the improvement of English listening comprehension. Meanwhile, in this thesis, the author made an experiment to check the hypothesis. In order to testify the feasibility, the author conducted the experiment in the two classes (among one hundred students) in September 2006 in the Secondary Vocational School of Yingkou City. Class1 is the Control Class (CC) and Class2 is the experimental Class (EC). The author adopted two experimental methods that are the paper-test and the questionnaire investigation. The subjects from Control Class (CC) and Experimental Class (EC) are employed to receive different instructions. EC is taught with the new listening teaching model based on the schema theory, while, at the same time, CC is still taught with the traditional way of listening teaching from the course book. After sixteen weeks training, the author used the statistical analysis software SPSS 12.0 to do a comparative analysis to the English listening test results and the results of the questionnaire before and after the experiment. It turns out that students in Secondary Vocational School mastered some listening skills and improved their listening comprehension after being trained with the new listening teaching model, and the new listening teaching model based on schema theory was more effective in improving listening comprehension than traditional listening teaching model.