| At present, English news broadcasts have become necessary in the teaching process of listening. English majors and non-English majors are all required to listen to English news broadcasts. English news broadcasts provide the listeners with a good chance to learn English. The English news broadcasts are rich in content and easy to get. Listening to English news report very often can not only improve the listeners' pronunciation, intonation, but also make them know about what have happened in the world recently, and broaden their horizon.But it is a great difficulty not only for the students to learn but also for the teachers to teach. This thesis tries to explore effective methods to improve the students' ability for English news listening from the perspective of schema theory. In order to explore the influence of schema theory, especially the effects of three schemata on students' English news listening, we carry out a questionnaire among 130 sophomores majoring in English at Taishan College, and an interview with three teachers who have taught English news listening for several years. This questionnaire is a closed one which consists of 20 multiple choice questions. It is a self-evaluation on the students' current situation of English news listening. The interview was an open one. Three teachers were asked to answer 3 questions.This study attempts to answer the following three questions:1) what are the problems students confront in the process of English news listening? 2) Do the three schemata have any effect on students' English news listening and how? 3) What are the problems teachers encounter in the teaching of English news listening?The major findings of the study are:1) The students' problems in English news listening mainly fall into 3 kinds:linguistic knowledge, background knowledge and structural knowledge of news listening. The speed, the accent, vocabulary, sentence and grammar become the obstacles of the English news listening more or less. And they also lack background knowledge and at the same time they can't use the content schema to predict and make inference effectively. What's more, they are also deficient in structural knowledge. All these become the obstacles of English news listening.2) Lack of time and proper textbook are the biggest obstacles for the English teachers to apply schema theory in English news listening.Based on these findings, some suggestions are given. For the students they should be fully equipped with these three schemata in English news listening and they should be active and modify these schemata effectively in the process of English news listening. For the English teachers they should give students proper instructions and choose the proper materials to help the students to pull through the difficulties.This thesis falls into five chapters. The first chapter is introduction. In this chapter it mainly introduces the importance of news listening and the significance of the study. In the second chapter, it mainly has a literature review on schema theory and listening. The third chapter is about the characteristics of college English news listening and the effect of schema theory on English news listening. In the fourth chapter, the writer carried out a questionnaire and an interview to find out the problems the students and teachers encounter in English news listening. the last chapter is the conclusion including the major findings, the limits of the study and the implications for college English news teaching. |
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