Abstract
Listening occupies one of the most preliminary parts in foreign language learning and becomes more and more important. Pre-listening process of listening comprehension owns two models, bottom-up and top-down. The latter that emphasizes the introduction of background knowledge is tightly related to content schema. The aim of the study is to examine the impact of content schema on listening comprehension and to find whether there is difference of the impact of content schema on students of different levels of listening comprehension by conducting an experiment. About 189 participants from Zhejiang University were divided into control group (CG) and experiment group (EG). Both the two groups did pretests, tests and questionnaires. CG and EG were separately divided into high- and low-level groups based on the pretest scores. Independent sample T-test was used to analyze data. The results showed that content schema negatively affected listening comprehension and it had stronger impact on students with low listening proficiency.
Highlights
Listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating are the basic skills to learn a foreign language, among which listening is acknowledged as the most basic skill in language learning
control group (CG) and experiment group (EG) were separately divided into high- and low-level groups based on the pretest scores
The results showed that content schema negatively affected listening comprehension and it had stronger impact on students with low listening proficiency
Summary
Listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating are the basic skills to learn a foreign language, among which listening is acknowledged as the most basic skill in language learning. The ultimate goal of foreign language learning is to acquire the communicative competence and listening lays the foundation for language acquisition. Listening comprehension is just regarded as the auditory input which means that teachers play recording and students finish listening tests. This situation has caused lots of problems. Listening is a feasible way to attain effective input and foreign language learners can master a language and acquire the communicative competence so that he or she has an integrated use of skills in speaking, reading, writing and translating. A survey shows that “people listen 45% of the time they spend in communicating and 30% of communication time was spent in speaking, 16% reading, and 9% writing” (Wilt, 1950)
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