The Application Of Schema Theory To English Listening Teaching In Chinese Senior Middle Schools

Listening is the most important and difficult skill among the four basic language skills—listening, speaking, reading and writing. According to some statistics, the proportion of listening in people's daily communication occupies as high as 45%. After we became a member of WTO, the chances of international association are increasing. Therefore, to improve students'listening comprehension appears to be an urgent task in language teaching. However, for the reason of the misunderstanding of listening comprehension and the single, outdated teaching approach, our students have poor listening ability which cannot be improved effectively.In view of this existing situation, this study attempts to probe into the following problems: the current situation of listening teaching; schema and schema theory; the application of schema theory into listening teaching and the implication in listening teaching with an experiment designed to verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the application. Hopefully this study can help to improve our daily language listening teaching as well as our students'listening ability effectively.This thesis is composed of five parts.The first part is the brief introduction of the current situation about listening teaching. The misunderstanding of listening teaching and listening comprehension in traditional listening teaching is mentioned here. So are the problems existing in the daily listening teaching. Furthermore, a study on current listening teaching in the world is also concluded on the aspects of understanding the listening comprehension process, choosing listening strategies, improving listening teaching approach and so on. Based on these researches, the current situation of listening teaching in China as well as the main existing problems are analyzed in this part.The second part presents the schema theory and a detailed elaboration on the relationship between schema theory and listening teaching . It is the theoretical basis for the whole thesis. The definition, classifications, characteristics of schema are discussed in this part. The application of schema theory into listening teaching. It is the core of the thesis. As we know, cognitive psychologist divided the information process of human being into two main modes—"top-down process"and"bottom-up process". There is no exception in gaining information from listening. During the listening process, the factors influencing the students'listening ability include not only their language ability but also some non-language, non-knowledge ones, which make the application of schema theory suitable and feasible in improving listening ability. In practical listening teaching, it is a vital condition to apply different types of schemata into different types of listening materials suitably for the aim of improving listening ability. To this point, a detailed elaboration can be found in this part. with the emphasis on the application of textural schema, which is always ignored in many former studies. Another emphasis is put on the application of content schema into the most difficult listening materials—news report. That is to say, the importance of background knowledge in listening comprehension also gets full explanation in this part.In the third part, there is an experiment designed for the application of schema theory. It consists of objectives, participants, methodology, result and statistical analysis, which can verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the application of schema theory.The last part focuses on the implication of schema theory in listening teaching and limitations in practical listening teaching.