The Teaching Of English Listening For Senior High School Students: A Perspective Of Schema Theory

As one of the four basic language skills, listening comprehension is very important in English language teaching and learning. However, the current quality of senior English listening teaching in China is yet unsatisfactory; the teaching of English listening is often characterized by explaining new words, playing tapes and checking answers with students. This single mode of Listening teaching might as well be described as "testing listening" rather than "teaching listening", falling far, far behind the ultimate goal of English listening Curricular. To put it more concretely, this kind of teaching practice blurs the goal and requirement of listening teaching and ignores the development of listening strategies and skills with the result of frustrating students' initiative, restraining students' interest and creativity and making listening comprehension a more and more difficult burden on the part of students.As is known to all, the purpose of English listening is to have an adequate understanding of what the speaker says and means, which is obviously an active process. To achieve this purpose, learners should have linguistic knowledge (i.e. pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax and semantics) and related background knowledge (i.e. the accumulation of "schema"). The present paper reviews the development in recent decades of the research on theories of listening comprehension. Then it gives a brief introduction to "schema theory" and discusses its significance and feasibility of application to senior high school English listening teaching. In order to verify the effectiveness of the schema-based listening teaching mode, the author conducted a six-month empirical study on teaching practice. It is found that schema theory can well be applied to English listening teaching by way of pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening teaching design to achieve intended success in English listening teaching and learning.