Experimental Study Of College English Listening Teaching Guided By Schema Theory

Listening is the most basic skill in daily communication and the second language acquisition. Littlewood(1981:66) points out that listening has been traditionally viewed as a passive skill, which misleads listeners, because the listeners reconstruct the speakers’message actively by using linguistic and non-linguistic sources. The improvement of listening comprehension ability depends on listening strategies to some extent.The traditional English listening class in college is boring, as the teacher always follows the "three steps" teaching model with words explaining, record playing and answers checking, which frustrates students" interest and enthusiasm severely and makes listening teaching far from satisfactory. College students pin their hopes on abundant exercises but their English listening ability stands still. In order to solve these problems, this research applies schema theory to College English listening teaching.It is the British psychologist Frederick Bartlett who introduced the concept of Schema in his book Remembering in1932. Bartlett holds that schemata are the structures that the constructive activity of memory is based on, that people’s memorization is able to organize various information and experience into cognitive structure and to form conventional schemata which are stored in their memory, and that the new experience can be understood compared with those schemata. In the1970s, the artificial intelligence founder, Marvin Minsky, applied the schema concept to psychology in order to solve the problem of how to make the computers equipped with human-like abilities, and put forward the frame construct. Minsky’s work in computer science has a strong and immediate impact on psychology and education. In1980the cognitive psychologist David Rumelhart elaborated Minsky’s ideas and turned them into an explicitly psychological theory of the mental representation of complex knowledge, a rudiment of schema theory. From then on, many researches on reading based on schema theory have sprung up.As the reading and listening are much alike in comprehension process, schema theory is applicable to listening comprehension. Schema theory throws light on one of the ways to solve the problems in ESL listening teaching.This research analyses the relationship between listening comprehension process and schema theory, and stresses the functions of schemata, background knowledge of listening comprehension. A one-semester experiment based on schema theory is conducted in College English listening teaching among60non-English majors in Grade2011in HUNAU. Experimental listening teaching involves many listening activities designed on the basis of content schema, formal schema and linguistic schema in pre-listening, while-listening, and post-listening stages respectively. All activities aim to activate existing schema and build new schema so as to help students improve their English listening comprehension ability.The results of experiment and data analysis verify that schema can facilitate students’ English listening comprehension. Well-designed listening activities which aim to activate students’existing schemata and build new schema not only train students’active listening ability, but also arouse their study interests and enthusiasm and help them foster an effective listening strategy. Therefore, schema theory is effective to the College English listening teaching for non-English majors in HUNAU.Some suggestions of College English listening teaching can be found in this thesis. First of all, the language teachers should teach students listening strategies and learning methods by means of listening material itself. Second, Nichols (1948) found that people listen and think at four times the normal conversation rate. Teachers should help the students be aware of that and encourage them to use the "rate gap" to process the message actively. At last, provided that all the teachers are well versed in schema theory, and value the process of activating existing schema in pre-listening, imparting listening strategy in while-listening, and reconstructing new schema in after-listening with a well-designed listening activities, students would benefit a great deal in College English listening class.