Applicatin Of Schema Theory In High School English Listening Teaching

The purpose of learning a foreign language is to take it as a tool for communication, either with people who speak that language or with written materials in that language. Besides in academic situations, lots of people receive information via the channel of listening. That is to say, listening is an essential competence for language learners. Listening is a critically important skill both for learners who want to participate in oral interpersonal communication and for those who want to receive information from such oral sources as lectures and media broadcasts. But in China, EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners’ listening comprehension is far from satisfactory. Mute English becomes a common phenomenon.Traditionally high school English teachers always focus on passing on knowledge concerning vocabulary, grammar to the students with much less attention paid to cultivating students’listening and speaking abilities. On the other hand, teachers tend to be the tape player and the one to offer the answers to the exercises of the listening material instead of exploring how to organize the listening classes and how they can help students to achieve better understanding when they are faced with various texts of different topics, different genres and different difficulty levels. That made it urgent for teachers to explore effective ways to help improve the students’ listening comprehension to avoid mute English and develop real competence in students.Schema theory tells us that the process of cognition is not just the input of new information into one’s brain but rather a two-way process, which involves the exchange of new information and the existing experience known as schema in one’s mind as well as the reconstruction of knowledge. According to schema theory, listening is a complicated process involving the exchanging of information between the listening text and the schema in the listener’s mind. And it’s the schema in the listener’s mind that determines the comprehension. Only when the listener has the necessary linguistic schema, formal schema and content schema can he achieve good understanding of the listening material.This research is meant to discuss the multiple dimensions of knowledge needed to achieve successful listening from the perspective of schema theory. On the other hand, the author makes an attempt to find out practical methods to organize effective English listening teaching in high schools.In the one-semester experiment, from the perspective of schema theory, the writer rearranged the process of the listening class. Listening is taught instead of tested in a three-step process, which includes pre-listening, while-listening, and post-listening. In pre-listening, the main task is to activate the students’ schema of the given topic effectively as well as arouse their interest and motivation to listen. In while-listening, the students should learn to use some listening strategies consciously to solve different tasks. While in post-listening, the teacher can help the students to further develop the strategies through cooperation in groups or pairs. During group work, the students feel more relaxed to take the opportunities to use what they have learned in the previous parts. In this way, their existing schema may be modified by adding some new elements to it.Through a semester’s experiment, more than two thirds of the subjects make progress in all the five aspects---intonation, grammar, vocabulary, cultural knowledge and listening strategies, especially in the last two aspects. And according to the result of the pre- and post-tests as well as that of the traditional monthly tests, we see that schema-oriented teaching in English listening teaching not only benefits the learners in listening competence but also in their overall English competence.