Application Of Schema Theory To English Listening Teaching In Junior High School

Teaching listening is always a hot potato in English teaching. The traditional teaching mode in China, play recording-listen-check answers-play again, cannot arouse enthusiasm of study as well as works little, which makes many of students consider English listening to be a hard nut to crack. What is worse, students are unable to meet the goals of the English Course Standard for Compulsory Education in Common Middle Schools(experimental draft).Based on former researches, this paper takes up the guidance of schema theory to discuss the teaching of listening in junior high schools. According to schema theory, background knowledge in the brain contributes to information acceptance by adding, adjusting and reconstructing. Although many factors-language knowledge, culture differences, physical limitations and listening strategies-affect listening, three kinds of comprehending processes (bottom-up, top-down, and interactive process) in schema theory guide, predict, supplement and select input information. That is, the more background knowledge listeners have, the easier understanding is, and the more background knowledge listeners can activate, the more of the materials listeners understand. Considering teaching goals in junior high school and current problems in listening teaching, how to apply schema theory in listening teaching is the focus of the paper. The efficiency of pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening asks for more attention and many ways to "construct schema, and activate schema" are discussed in the paper. A teaching plan was designed on this basis. To compare students’ different ideas about the experimental teaching and the traditional one, two questionnaires were designed to collected and analyzed data:the first questionnaire was given before the experimental teaching to get students’response to current teaching, and the second one was given after the experimental teaching to get students’response to the experimental teaching. The conclusion is that the application of schema theory improves the efficiency of listening in junior high school. Some implications are inspired, and it is expected that the research can bring some inspirations for English listening teaching in junior high school.