A Study Of The Schema-theory-based Diagrammatic Method Of Teaching English Listening In Secondary Vocational School

English Listening, as one of the basic language skills, helps one to distinguishand understand the utterances in English. In terms of learning English as the foreignlanguage, listening is the way to provide learners adequate language input, which isvery important for one to understand and produce communicative English. Therefore,the teaching of English listening and the acquisition of higher level of listeningcomprehension in English are both equally significant. Especially in Chinese context,the teaching effect of English listening, to some extent, decides how well students arelearning English, for classrooms are almost the main place where they can beshowered in English. In life, students lack the social context to apply what they havelearned in their English class. However, unfortunately, the fact is that Englishlistening has always been the weakest, compared with reading, writing and speaking.There are certainly a variety of reasons. Teaching methodology is one of the factorsaffecting the teaching effect of English listening. It is more so in the secondaryvocational school (SVS), where English listening is not only a required subject forstudents but also closely related with their graduation and their future jobs.Therefore, it is always necessary and demanding for the English teachers inSVS to try more effective teaching methods than only using the traditional method,which is more characteristic of teacher centered and most of the time the main task ofteaching is for students to pass the tests. This study intends to examine the teachingeffect of a potentially more applicable teaching method, which is designed based on schema theory, the diagrammatic method.To study the effects of the schema-theory-based diagrammatic teaching methodon SVS students’ listening, the researcher chose two parallel classes of non-Englishmajors’ in Medical School Attached to China Medical University. Both of the twoclasses had the same English courses and the same researcher teacher. The onlydifference of the two classes was that the randomly-assigned control class remained tobe taught as in the past, in the common regular way, and the other contrast classincorporated the diagrammatic method of teaching English listening. The researchinstruments include questionnaire, tests and interview. The students’ interests andachievements of English listening are specifically examined. The results show that theschema-theory-based diagrammatic method does have significant effects to improveSVS students’ English listening comprehension and their interests to love and getmore engaged in English listening.