Research On Schema-Theory-Based College English Listening Teaching

Listening skill plays a major role in the success of one's communication skills as listening provides the foundation for the development of reading, writing and speaking abilities. However, an outstanding number of students in college have low level of listening proficiency as the teaching approaches are stereotyped. In 2007, State Education Ministry declares in The College English Curriculum Requirements that students'comprehensive language competence, in particular, listening and speaking abilities should be further developed. Therefore, it is necessary to reform the current teaching methods.Listening was considered as a passive one-way comprehensive process, but an increasing number of studies have found that listening comprehension requires active and full engagement of listeners. Schema theory provides theoretical perspective for this founding. It claims that listening comprehension is an interactive process between listeners'prior knowledge (linguistic knowledge and background knowledge) and the incoming information. Listening comprehension can be achieved via interactive information processing mode and the application of schemata which includes the process of activating, constructing and consolidatingHence, this paper aims to explore listening method from schema-theoretical perspective in order to help students make progress in listening comprehension.This essay first reviews some relevant literatures on listening comprehension and schema theory, and then conducts a pre-study of questionnaire and interview to analyze the effect of schemata in listening comprehension and summarize the universal problems in listening learning and teaching. It is found that students lack schematic consciousness, fail to apply proper strategies, and comprehend in a single information processing mode. Meanwhile, teachers are not aware of practicing schema theory in their listening teaching. On the basis of the previous theoretical and practical study, a three-stages listening teaching model is afterwards constructed:the pre-listening stage aims to assist students in activating existing schemata, constructing new schemata, and cultivating predicting ability; the while-listening stage focuses on helping students process information interactively and apply schematic strategies; the post-listening stage mainly contributes to students'consolidation of schemata. Lastly, the research conducts a term-long class experiment. Through data analysis and students'interview, it has shown that students in experimental class are more likely to gain higher scores in listening comprehension than the ones in the controlled class. Moreover, students would be more active in consciously utilizing listening strategies and interactive information processing mode. Therefore, the new teaching model has been proved to be feasible and valid.