【正文】 thus teachers should try to tell them about the origin of the festival. After it, teachers surely can make students who are without the relevant background knowledge get rid of the anxiety and gain confidence in listening the material. Strengthen teaching of listening skillsIn listening prehension, the newlyheard sound will be kept for about one second in the echo memory, during which students match sound and word with linguistic knowledge and put the word in the shortterm memory. The function of shortterm memory is to remember the word until listener organize the word into sentence and grasp the idea of it, then clear up the memory of the word to keep another newheard information. If students try to remember each word and sentence, shortterm memory will be overloaded, and many words will be cleared up before being organized, thus they can just remember the last sentence they heard. So students should grasp some listening skills to improve their ability of listening. Make use of the questions and options before listening and predict the listening contentStudents should try to make full use of the time between the handing out of listening material and the playing of the material to skim the questions and the options fast. Then make efforts to predict the content of the listening materials, such as the time, place, people, figure, career, or the topic and purport. With such activities, students would gradually form the habit of making use of titles, topics or whatever clues to predict what was ing next. Only by doing so can they use their rich content and experiential knowledge to anticipate and predict what is going to be heard. It would be of great benefit for their listening prehension. For instance, look at the following questions. 1． What did the Frenchman e to England to do? familiarity with the situation, their background knowledge, and their purpose of listening before the listening training begins. Schema theory Schema theory has been widely applied in foreign language teaching in the decades. James (1892)suggested that there be basically three areas of schema or prior knowledge structure that played a part in the act of listening or reading prehension: that was, linguistic schema(language), formal schema(rhetoric knowledge), and content schema(topic knowledge). The application of these three schemas can arouse the background knowledge that students had in their minds and give students a big help in listening prehension. Thus, it will be a great remedy for the defects of traditional listening teaching methods and accordingly improve students39。 Lynch, 1988). Researchers have found that there are topdown and bottomup processing operate simultaneously in the listening process (Anderson amp。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 int