The Application Of Schema Theory To The Teaching Of Senior High English Listening

Listening, as one of the most frequently used language skills, plays a significant role in foreign language acquisition. Especially, with the rapid growth of China’s economy, much attention is attached to it, since the trades between China and the world have tremendously increased. Therefore, the teaching of English listening has been taken more and more seriously. The New Standard Curriculum for Senior High School (Revised Edition) emphasizes the importance of listening teaching. However, the current Chinese senior high listening teaching is not very satisfactory because of the long-time ignorance. The traditional teaching mode has many deficiencies. Some effective teaching strategies are always put aside and teachers simply play the recorder, and rarely give tips instead. During the whole listening process students are only being tested, which makes listening courses unbearably boring. This kind of teaching mode is far from sharpening up their listening skills, let alone improving their listening comprehension.Listening is an active process of communication. The understanding of the listening material requires background knowledge and cognitive strategies. If the listener is good at making use of background knowledge, it would be easy for him to understand the speaker’s meaning. The listener’s previously acquired knowledge is equal to the listener’s background knowledge, which includes the listener’s all kinds of language using, social knowledge, cultural background, and common sense and so on. The storage of background knowledge is called the "schema". The richer the "schemata" are, the easier the listening materials will be for the listeners.This thesis, aiming at solving the above problems, launches a research by employing systematic teaching designs and practice to find a more efficient teaching mode for English listening, schema theory oriented senior high school English listening teaching. It is widely accepted that new knowledge is acquired by the interaction between the originally existing knowledge in our mind and the new one. This process is fulfilled by the active involvement of the listeners. What the teacher should do is to make the students get involved in teaching so as to activate the previous schemata, construct and consolidate the new schemata. The thesis tries to confirm the following statement:Applying schema theory into listening teaching practice has great influence on improving students’English listening comprehension capacity, compared with the traditional teaching methods.