Study On English Listening Teaching In The Secondary Vocational Schools From The Perspective Of Cognition

Listening, as a kind of language skill used most frequently in normal daily life, is quite of importance in foreign language teaching. In order to meet the needs of social development, English teaching in the secondary vocational schools should focus on training the students' ability of communicating in English. Listening is the core of communication, so strengthening the students' listening training is especially crucial in the secondary vocational schools. However, the status quo of listening teaching in the secondary vocational schools is not satisfactory. The traditional way of teaching listening and the students' poor language knowledge lead to their terrible listening ability. According to this, the writer tries adopting Schema Theory and Relevance Theory in listening teaching of the secondary vocational schools in an effort to change the status quo and enhance the students listening comprehension.Language learning is a complex process, which concerns input, cognition, comprehension, memorization and practice, etc. A significant amount of research has proved that schema is the knowledge framework and psychological construction in human mind and plays an important role in the process of language cognition. At the same time, the research has revealed the role of schema in listening comprehension, therefore many scholars have applied it to listening teaching. Relevance Theory emphasizes the role of cognition in language communication and assumes that language communication is a kind of cognitive inference process, that is, people can infer the new information through the relevant knowledge to understand the utterance. Listening comprehension is just a kind of active process, which concerns predicting, inferring, confirming, and communicating. Accordingly we can say both Schema Theory and Relevance Theory can be used to explain the complex psychological process of listening comprehension and play crucial parts in listening comprehension.During the process of experiment, some new teaching methods are used under the implications of Schema Theory and Relevance Theory, which can arouse the students' interest and make them learn listening actively.The whole thesis is divided into six parts. The first part is introduction. It illustrates the background, contents and the aim of the study and gives the framework of the thesis. Chapter one summaries the situation and achievements of listening comprehension and teaching abroad and at home; elaborates the essence and modes of listening comprehension; analyzes the status quo of listening teaching in the secondary vocational schools and the problems of domestic listening research; proposes the significance of this study. Chapter two introduces the theoretical foundations. Chapter three investigates and analyzes the listening problems of the students in the secondary vocational schools and gives implications and suggestions according to Schema Theory and Relevance Theory. Chapter four discusses how to design the experiment to verify the effect of adopting Schema Theory and Relevance Theory. The last part gives a conclusion of the experiment and points out its value and limitations.