Research On English Listening Teaching In College English Based On Schema Theory

Listening has always been the focus of language teaching, although its teaching effects are far from satisfaction. In the traditional listening teaching mode, students are treated as “passive recipients”, and teachers put more emphasis on the explanation of vocabulary and grammar points, instead of providing some useful teaching strategies. During this process, students can not get any hints of the background knowledge and thus they can not do some listening skill training. There are many reasons for this situation, among them the most fundamental one is because the traditional theories guiding the current listening teaching are not perfect, which results in the lack of the scientificity and effectiveness in the present listening teaching mode.According to schema theory, background knowledge plays an important role during the process of listening comprehension, for whether listeners can understand new information depends to a large degree on how much background knowledge they have activated. Apart from background knowledge, contextual clues and various learning strategies can also help listeners understand the speakers' words. Therefore, schema theory offers a new thought for listening teaching and makes up for the defects of traditional teaching. In this thesis, the author uses schema theory to guide listening teaching, aiming to analyze its function during the process of listening teaching through a systematic teaching arrangement. Going into college English classes, the author analyses the collected authentic materials, trying to construct a high-efficiency English listening teaching mode.The thesis can be divided into five chapters. Chapter one introduces the background, research purpose and structure of this thesis. Chapter two focuses on the literature review, including the research situation of schema theory and listening comprehension both at home and abroad. Besides, the core content and its significance of schema theory are also mentioned in this chapter. Chapter three elaborates on the content of the research design, involving six aspects including the experimental hypothesis, research subject, teaching method, etc. Chapter four is the body part, in which conclusions are get through the comparative analysis of questionnaires and data from two teaching experiments. The collected data shows that compared with the traditional teaching method, the new listening teaching model under the guide of schema theory is more effective and thus teachers need to insist on schema theory throughout the listening teaching. Chapter five reaches the conclusion and the major findings of the study are summarized. Major findings are as follows: Generally speaking, students have possessed some basic knowledge of schema theory, however, they are still weak as for the proper use of strategies and skills. Teachers need to change their roles from dominants to guiders in class and apply correct strategies of schema theory into listening teaching. Then the author raises some feasible suggestions for future teaching experiment in this area. And furthermore, the author summarizes the major findings and some shortcomings of this thesis to offer some help in further teaching research of schema theory.