Application Of Content And Formal Schema In The Teaching Of English Majors' Listening Comprehension

Schema theory has been one of the prevailing theories in the field of language teaching in the past two decades or so.Schema is people's general knowledge of the world,namely one's "pre-existing knowledge"or "background knowledge".The theory of how a reader or a listener makes use of his schematic knowledge to achieve efficient comprehension during reading or listening is called schema theory.Based on previous researches,the thesis discusses in detail the application of content and formal schema in the English majors,listening teaching through activating student'previous schemata stored in their minds or setting up new schemata before listening and points out the way of applying schema theory to English listening teaching is to design more activities.The teacher reminds the students to utilize some techniques and strategies while listening so that they can comprehend and remember the listening materials quickly,consolidating what the students learnt by exercises of combining listening with speaking or writing.The most outstanding features of schema is more background information introduced,making up for the insufficiency of the taditional listening teaching model and improving the listening teaching effects.Based on previous theoretic researches,the author carried out a small-scale teaching experiment,aiming to verify the active role of content and formal schemata in improving students' English listening comprehension.The subjects are second-year English majors from XJUFE.The different listening teaching method guided by content and formal schema theory was applied in the experimental class,while the traditional teaching model was applied in the control class during the 18-week experiment.After the experiment,the two classes were given the same test and the scores were analyzed by SPSS statistical package.The experiment conclusion shows that the teaching model based on the schema theory is more in line with the psychological characteristics of the students,which can arouse the students' learning interest.And the teaching model based on schema theory is more effective than the traditional one in improving students' listening ability.The listening teaching model based on the content and formal schema theory can improve students' English listening comprehension.The thesis consists of six chapters.Chapter one is the introduction to the background and significance of the thesis;chapter two is a brief literature review,including the concept,classification and development of schema,as well as the process of listening comprehension and the function of schema in listening comprehension;the theoretical framework for the thesis in chapter three;a small-scale experiment is described in chapter four;the author presents some results and discussion in chapter five;in chapter six,based on the findings mentioned above,the author puts forward some implications of applying of content and formal schema in the teaching of English majors' listening comprehension,followed by the direction of future research.