Application Of Schema Theory To English Listening Teaching In Senior High School

With the rapid development of global economy and the increasing cultural communication between countries,English becomes the most widely-used language in the world,so English talents are needed in all walks of life.As a result,English teaching and learning are vitally important.According to the English Curriculum standards(2011),students are required to master comprehensive English skills: listening,speaking,reading and writing.Given that a person spends the most time on listening and that it has a great influence on the other three skills,listening is acknowledged as the most basic skill in language learning.Unfortunately,the traditional listening teaching mode which attaches excessive importance to vocabulary and grammar and neglects students' prior knowledge results in students' anxiety,lack of interest,and poor performance on the part of students in listening comprehension.According to the current situation of English listening teaching in China,the thesis proposes to apply schema theory to English listening teaching so that students' interest in English listening can be aroused and listening ability can be improved.Schema which includes linguistic schema,content schema,and formal schema means the structural knowledge that a listener has already obtained and is stored in his or her mind.Unlike traditional views,schema theory regards listening comprehension as an active interactive process during which the listener could comprehend the listening material with some related listening strategies such as predicting and supplementing based on the listening context and his prior knowledge,which,combined with the new information,can reduce the difficulty and increase the accuracy in listening comprehension.Based on this theory,the thesis also proposes the way to apply schema theory to listening teaching so as to prove the feasibility of the application of schema theory to listening teaching.The research mainly focuses on the following questions:(1)What influence does schema theory-based teaching mode have on senior high school students' listening performance?(2)What are students' attitudes towards schema theory-based teaching mode?To explore the effectiveness of schema theory in listening teaching,the author conducts a four-month teaching experiment in Zhengzhou NO.20 senior high school.The subjects are the 78 students from two parallel classes in Grade one.Class 3 which has 38 students is chosen as the experimental class and Class 4 as the control class randomly by the author.The author tests them at the same time before and after the experiment and collects the data to testify the effectiveness of schema theory in listening teaching.The author also conducts interviews and questionnaires in the two classes before and after the experiment to know students' listening habits and their attitudes towards schema theory-based teaching mode.The results show that after the application of schema theory,students have much better performance on listening and that they are more intended to use listening strategies based on schema theory.What's more,their interest in listening class have been enhanced.Therefore,the experiment proves that schema theory is effective in English listening teaching in senior high school.