ABSTRACT:Being the base of English reading, writing, and speaking, listening is a vital component of the English language teaching and learning. In recent years, more and more teachers and students pay attention to develop students’ listening comprehension ability. However, it is still a weak point for most English majors.

    Currently, there are a lot of applications of schema theory to listening teaching which confirmed the effectiveness of schema theory, but few researches on the application of schema theory to English majors’ English listening could be found in the previous researches. The thesis takes the relationship between schema theory and listening comprehension of English majors as the research point to explore the situation about the application of schema theory to English majors’ listening learning by questionnaire. The results of investigation indicated that there were three existing problems. Firstly, students neglect the accumulation of language knowledge, such as pronunciation, intonation, vocabulary and grammar, etc. Secondly, students lack the relevant cultural background knowledge. Thirdly, students can’t use the structure of materials to comprehend the listening materials. Based on above problems, the writer gives some suggestions from the perspective of schema theory both on English listening teaching and learning. It is hoped that these suggestions can be practices by English majors so as to promote their listening proficiency to some degree.

Keywords: listening comprehension; schema theory; background knowledge

TABLE OF CONTENTS

摘要

ABSTRACT

1 INTRODUCTION-1

1.1 Background of the Study-1

1.2 Significance of the Study-2

1.3 Organization of the Thesis-2

2 LITERATURE REVIEW-4

2.1 Overseas Research-4

2.2 Domestic Research-4

2.3 Schema Theory and the Listening Processing-6

2.3.1 The definition of schema-6

2.3.2 Types of Schema-7

2.3.3 Listening Process and Listening Comprehension-7

2.4 Summary-10

3 METHODOLOGY-11

3.1 Introduction-11

3.2 Procedures-11

3.2.1 Participants-11

3.2.2 Instruments-11

3.2.3 Data collection and analysis-12

4 DISCUSSING AND FINDINGS-19

4.1 Major Findings-19

4.2 Suggestions-19

4.3 Limitations of the study-21

5 CONCLUSION-22

REFERENCES-23

APPENDIX-25

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS-27