【正文】 畢業(yè)論文How to Improve Junior High School Students’ Listening Ability in English Teaching1. Introduction 12. The purpose of listening 33. The listening processes and schema theory 3 The listening processes 4 The bottomup listening process (Microprocessing) 4 The topdown listening process (Macroprocessing) 5 The interaction of the two processes 6 Schema theory 84. The objective and subjective factors that affect students’ listening 8 Objective factors 9 The speed of the listening materials 9 The speakers’ pronunciation and intonation 9 Length of listening materials 10 The listening environment condition 10 Subjective factors 10 The listeners’ phonetic knowledge and vocabulary 11 Psychological problems 12 Listening skills 12 Background knowledge 135. Strategies to improve students’ English listening prehension 13 Strengthen students’ mastering of basic knowledge of pronunciation and vocabulary 13 Motivate students to practice listening as much as possible outside the class 14 Create a good listening environment 15 Select proper listening materials 15 Try to reduce students’ anxiety and make them be confident in listening 17 Explain the background knowledge and the difficult words if necessary 18 Strengthen teaching of listening skills 19 Make use of the questions and options before listening and predict the listening content 19 Catch the key point of the material, and make simple notes during listening 21 Pay attention to word stress and the topic sentence 23 Comprehend the whole listening materials and skip the difficult words 24 Check the answers of the options with existed experience and background knowledge 256. Conclusion 25References 261. Introduction Listening, speaking, reading and writing are the four basic skills that English learners in junior high school should develop. And listening ranks first among these four skills. Rivers investigates that listening contributes 45% of the actual situation of language application. Obviously it is an important means of munication and an important channel of knowledge and information acquisition. The improvement of junior high school students’ listening ability is very helpful to the development of their abilities of speaking, reading and writing. Therefore, great importance should be attached to the improvement of students’ listening ability in English teaching in junior high school. However, the training of listening has not been placed in its proper position in traditional teaching for a long time and hence listening has long been a weak point. Many students think that listening is one of the most difficult things in English study, and even some of them have difficulty in understanding what their teachers teach in English. As the development of students’ listening ability has bee the demand of middle school’s New English Curriculum Standard, nowadays the training of listening has drawn unprecedented attention than before. How to increase the students’ ability in listening and how to improve students’ listening prehension in the examination has been the mon concern of many English teachers’. Based on schema theory, this thesis tries to probe into junior high school students’ problems into listening and to seek solutions for these problems so as to improve their listening ability. 2. The purpose of listeningAn English linguist, Halliday, points that there are three functions of listening, interpersonal function, ideational function and textual function. For middle school students, the purpose of English listening is undoubtedly the ideational function, that is to say, to catch information. Listening prehension is a very important ability of understanding language and semantics. The nature of listening prehension meant that learners should be encouraged to engage in an active process of listening for meaning, using not only the linguistic clues but also their nonlinguistic knowledge. More recently, Michael Rost (2005) also claimed that listeners utilized aural cues and background knowledge to identify a logical form for what was said. So, the listeners should plicatedly transform the phonetic signal。 the whole process is a very active dynamic one. It is the bination of the background knowledge, context and the linguistic knowledge. It should continuously absorb and understand the listening materials, and finally form the prehension process. Thus, English teachers must let students understand the processes of listening and the purpose of listening prehension and give them the opportunities to practice and improve the listening abilities. The aim of listening prehension is to obtain the speaker’s intended meaning. While grasping the speaker’s informative intention, the listener’s attention should be paid to the speaker’s municative intention.3. The listening processes and schema theoryTraditionally, listening, as well as reading, was considered as a “passive skill”. That is to say，listeners are simply passive processors who undertake automatic signal recognition exercises as acoustic signals. But with progress of research on listening, scholars found that listening was an active and dynamic process indeed. Reviers(1978)pointed out that listening was not passive but an active process of constructing a message from a stream of sound with what one knew of the phonological, semantic, and syntactic potentialities of the language. Thomas Devine(1987)made a clearer division and stated it from two levels: at its basic level, it was similar to decoding in reading。 at its higher level, it was much more like thinking. The listening processesBy adopting the schematheory, researchers envisaged listening as involving or displaying two opposite information processing orientations, topdown process and bottomup process. These two processes of listening have dominated language pedagogy over the last twenty years. A number of evidence has accumulated that effective listening requires