An Empirical Study On The Application Of Schema Theory In College English Listening Class

Listening, as one of the four requisite skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing), isone of the most important factors that influence communication. Nowadays, improvingEnglish listening ability has been called to the front in English teaching and studying.However, it is still found some unsatisfaction in the current listening teaching. The collegeEnglish listening teaching is often characterized by teaching new words and grammaticalknowledge. In the listening classes, teachers are instructors while students were often actingas passive receivers. Initially, listening was believed as a passive one-way comprehensiveprocess, just like reading. This way of teaching severely frustrated students’ initiative andhinders students’ interest and creativity.With the development of research on listening comprehension process, it was graduallyfound that listening comprehension was an interactive process in which listeners’ backgroundknowledge played an active and important role. Schema theory lays a theoretical foundationfor this discovery. Though researchers had done lots of research based on schema and Englishlearning, and they believed schema was effective for English learning. But how to change thetheory into listening teaching was challenging for different scholars. Therefore, the authorwrites down this thesis "Schema Theory on ESL Listening Teaching in College" based on herown opinion on the application of schema theory.On the basis of previous theoretic researches, the writer conducts an experiment byteaching English listening based on schema theory. It aims to check whether the “three-stageteaching model” based on schema theory is effective in improving students’ English listeningcomprehension or not. The author also tries to find out whether there are some differencesbetween high-mark students and low-mark students in using schema in listening.60freshmenfrom two classes with the similar achievements in English Listening test, who major ingeotechnical engineering in Chang’an University are treated as subjects. The teaching lasts forsix weeks. The "three-stage teaching model" is used in one of the classes as the experimentalgroup and the other class is the control group taught by common used method (re-listeningmethod called by the author in this thesis). At the end of this teaching process, the two classeswere asked to take the post-test and their scores were analyzed by SPSS17.0statistical package (Statistical Product and Service Solutions17.0).After the experiment, it is concluded that the "three-stage listening model" based on theschema theory, can improve the achievements of students’ English listening comprehensionmore effectively. And students with high-mark are good at using schemata in listeningprocess.