The Application Of Schema Theory In The Teaching Of College English Listening For Non-english Majors

Over the past few decades, English has been viewed as global language; more andmore concern about the English teaching has obtained. However, the current collegeEnglish teaching efficiency is not optimistic, and college students’ English listening abilityis particularly worrisome. Listening plays a very important role in second languageacquisition and language teaching. How to overcome the weak points of listening teachinghas become a very important problem.This thesis attempts to apply schema theory to college English listening teaching. Thisthesis analyzes the current situation of college English listening teaching, reviews therelated theories and discusses the feasibility of applying schema theory to college Englishlistening teaching.Schema theory formulates the role of the listeners’ background knowledge inlanguage comprehension. That is to say, a listener can understand a new text only when heutilizes previously acquired knowledge. According to schema theory, listeners’ problemsare related to absence of schema as well as non-activation of schema. Therefore, schematheory is very important in listening comprehension process. So, the application of schematheory could improve the students’ English listening proficiency.According to schema theory, this paper attempts to construct a new college Englishlistening teaching model, which aims both to improve students’ interest of learning Englishlistening and to improve students’ English listening comprehension ability. This study aimsto answer the following research questions:1. Is the new teaching model under the instruction of schema theory more effective toimprove students’ interest of learning English listening than conventional teaching model?2. Is the new teaching model under the instruction of schema theory more effective topromote students’ listening competence than conventional teaching model?3. What is the effect of the new teaching model under the instruction of schema theoryon the listening competence of high-level group, intermediate-level group and low-levelgroup respectively?This study is a combination of quantitative and qualitative study.68non-Englishmajors from two natural classes in Arts and Science College of Bohai University wereselected as subjects of this study, one as the experimental class and the other one as thecontrol class. The experimental class adopted the listening teaching model under theinstruction of schema theory while the control class adopted traditional teaching model.Through the analysis of scores of pre-test, post-test and the questionnaire of two classesand the interview for the experimental class, the conclusion has been got. Compared with traditional listening teaching model, the new teaching model underthe instruction of schema theory is more efficient to improve students’ interest of learningEnglish listening and it is more efficient to promote students’ listening competence; it hassignificant effect on the listening competence of the students of high, intermediate andlow-level group.