An Empirical Study Of Listening Teaching Of Non-English Majors Under The Guidance Of Schema Theory

Listening has played an irreplaceable role in the rapidly developing audio era in themodern time, and English communication ability has been specifically highlighted under thenew circumstances of informational convergence of China with the world. However, so mucheffort is expended with so little apparent effect in the traditional listening teaching model. Inorder to change the unbalanced situation at the present, the author attempts to transform theteaching idea and method by doing some researches, and puts forward some suggestions forthe English listening teaching.In real life, unacquainted language environment, the amount of information varying fromminute to minute and simple listening teaching mechanism are all adverse factors, which giverise to the phenomenon that students have always failed to grasp the main point in listeningcomprehension. The failure of listening comprehension dampens the students’ learningenthusiasm more severely. In view of this phenomenon, the author attempts to carry out therelated research about the relation between schema theory and listening comprehension, andexplores the way of reforming for English listening teaching.Schema is the knowledge structure of the world stored in the long-term memory, whichwill be associated with the existing knowledge and provide knowledge basis when peopleprocess new information. Schema theory claims that listening comprehension is not a passiveprocess, but a process in which listeners positively adjust the background knowledge in theirmind to strengthen their understanding of the input information and then reconstruct it. Therelevant knowledge in the listeners’ mind will arouse their motivation for listening. Thefamiliar context will help listeners make predictions of the content, effectively comprehendthe meaning of words, phrases and sentences and adjust their understanding. And, finally, based on the previous knowledge, new information is fully understood by the listeners andbecomes part of the knowledge structure in the listeners’ mind for future use. Schemata can beclassified into three categories, namely, linguistic schema, content schema and formal schema.According to the cognitive psychology, listening comprehension is an interactive-compensatory cognitive process, in which the bottom-up and top-down comprehension modelwork together in every phase of understanding. This perspective stresses the importance of theschema theory in the aspect of English listening teaching and demonstrates that students’English listening comprehension is closely related to the schema construction and activation.In this paper, the writer makes the experiment about English listening teaching, which provesthe college English listening teaching based on the schema theory is more effective than thetraditional one. This ensures us to help the students activate and construct as much knowledgestructure in the class as time permits.The conclusion part summarizes the research results of this paper, pointes out itslimitation and states writer’s expectation that this paper may be of little help to those who willmake further research into this filed.