THE EFFECT OF FORMAL SCHEMA ON COLLEGE ENGLISH LISTENING COMPREHENSION IN EFL1

Listening comprehension used to be thought of as a passive skill, and listeners were called as“tape-recorder” (Anderson Lynch,1988). But in fact it is an active process, in which what the listener wants to get is an adequate understanding of what the speaker said and what the speaker meant. To achieve this purpose, English listeners should utilize contextual clues, background knowledge and depend on many learning strategies. Active listeners will understand what the speakers said with relevant background knowledge and their particular purpose. In recent years, there has been a lot of progress English listening teaching in China, and studies on application of schema theory into listening comprehension have become more and more popular in both pedagogical theory and experiments. Schema is one of major factors that affect people‟s listening comprehension. The present study, with second-year non-English majors as subjects, aimed to investigate the effect of formal schema on college English listening comprehension. It was found that when there is a lack of relevant formal schema, there will be a short-circuit of listening comprehension. It is also proved that activation of formal schema improves college students‟ listening comprehension. Therefore, it is necessary to improve college students‟ language skills and help them build up relevant formal schema as well.