A Practical Study On The Effect Of Schema Activation In English Listening Comprehension To Non-English Majors

Listening is regarded as the most frequently used and most difficult-grasped skill of five basics,mainly because it has some special characteristics: velocity of the voice is fast and elusive, the perceptible time of the brain to the input language is limited,the process is invisible.These characteristics contribute to mystique of listening.And influenced by the traditional concept of foreign language study,listeners are only viewed as passive receivers in the listening process,the result of this activity is that the listeners listen one or two times and the teachers check the answers. In general,It is along the pattern of Listening and Testing for many years,so the listeners not only couldn t enhance their ability, but also could feel frustrated in mental.In view of these questions and based on the function of schema,this paper,from the perspective of cognitive psychology,intends to explore how the college students use schema to facilitate their listening comprehension and obtain its effect.The purpose of doing this is to help them improve the listening skill.Bartlett(1932),the first psychologist to use the schema,and Rumelhart(1980)both hold the view that the background knowledge plays an important role in language comprehension . According to the model of theoretical relations between schema and listening comprehension,English listening comprehension is like building bridges between the new and the known.during the process,listeners should relate what is known to interpreting the new information,so it is an interacting activity between the background knowledge(schema) and the input language information in the brain.In a word,it is obvious that listening comprehension is not the input stream of the linguistic knowledge to the ear, it is an initiative and an interactive process, listener is not a passive receiver but a initiative performer (Rost 1991). The schema has its important theoretical significance on English listening teaching and learning.For the purpose of exploring the effective ways to improve the freshmen s listening skill, the quantitative,qualitative experiments and the survey study are conducted,SPSS16.0 are used to do the frequency,mean analysis and T tests. The data implies that their listening skill is highly improved,and confidence is enhanced under the training of theoretical framework of schema. Relating to their personal experiences and resources, they learn to use the note to practise these strategies: recalling,imaging,coding,decoding,detecting,assessing,and to achieve the purpose of delivering information.The result of the study reveals that listening teaching and learning should not only be focused on decoding of linguistic knowledge for the freshman. The lack of sociocultural, factual, or contextual knowledge of target language may also be an obstacle to listening comprehension. that is to say, the supplement of related background knowledge or the possession of it can actively facilitate listening comprehension ,which supports and testifies the two assumptions proposed by the author:(1) The college students listening ability advances greatly by activating the schema. (2)Possessing schematic knowledge can help the listeners alleviate the negative influence of lacking linguistic knowledge when they are low-level during the listening process. The result from the evaluation of tests and empirical researches shows that activating the schema can enhance students memory capability or assn,and further promote the usage of the listening strategy by inspiring the listener. Therefore, it will be internalized into a type of consultant force.Based on the highly significant theory study,the theoretical model is constructed and some pedagogical implications for English listening teaching and learning are drawn by the practice. From this, It is hoped that this study will shed light on English listening teaching and learning for the freshman.