【正文】 owledgeDifferent countries have different cultural background. When the listening materials that students listen to are about the cultures which are different from their own culture, they may find it difficult to understand. So if listeners have little background knowledge of other countries, they cannot have a good understanding of the listening materials even though they are familiar with the word they have heard.5. Strategies to improve students’ English listening prehension Since we have known many factors that affect the junior high school students’ listening prehension, we can adopt a number of ways to improve their listening abilities according to the above mentioned factors. Strengthen students’ mastering of basic knowledge of pronunciation and vocabularyAs it is known to all, junior high school students are still lacking in basic phonetic knowledge and vocabulary. However, the basic strategy of developing students’ listening abilities is to teach them the basic knowledge of pronunciation, such as syllable, stress, sensestop, linking, and inplete plosive. Besides, Teachers should pay attention to the input of the knowledge of phonetics and intonation during the normal teaching, speaking English in the idiomatic way during the class, and tell them to listen to the tape, English songs, English radio, and watch English TV program after the class in order to make them be familiar with English and American pronunciation and intonation. For example, knowledge about the differences between the vowels /i:/ as in seat and /i/ as in sit, between /u:/ as in pool and /u/ as in pull, and between /:/ as in port and // as in pot. Besides, teachers should try to motivate the students to read as much as possible in order to enlarge their vocabulary. To improve listening prehension, a variety of reading is indispensable. If students want to enhance their listening prehension, they must enlarge their vocabulary as much as possible with a variety of reading. . read some English books, magazines and newspapers about geography, history, culture and stories. Motivate students to practice listening as much as possible outside the classAs junior high school students are still beginners of English learning. Most of them still have no consciousness to pay enough attention to listening. They may only practice listening in class and often neglect practicing their listening after class. “Practice makes perfect.” There is no exception to listening learning. Training of listening should run through every period of English class, or even out of class. If only in listening class, junior high school students39。 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。 b) formal schemata, which are knowledge of how discourse is organized with respect to different genres, different topics, or different purpose. Contextual knowledge involves both an understanding of the specific listening situation and an understanding of the ongoing discourse. That is to say, in the topdown processing, people constructs, or more accurately, reconstructs the original knowledge of themselves to analysis and deal with the received information, such as words and sentences. The dealing of language information is mainly depending on the internal source. In this reconstruction process, the listener can use prior knowledge of the context and situation within which the listening takes place to predict and make sense of what he or she hears. Context of situation includes such things as knowledge of the topic at hand, the speaker or speakers, and their relationship to the situation as well as prior events. The speakers’ main task is to prehend the received words. During a topdown processing process, listeners are observed to deploy their knowledge of the world, situations and roles of human interaction to prehend meaning. The interaction of the two processesThe process of listening is a plicated psychological activity. Now it is generally recognized that both bottomup and topdown theories are applicable in explaining how listeners understand what they hear. In developing courses, materials, and lessons, it is important, not only to teach bottomup processing skills such as the ability to discriminate between minimal pairs, but it is also important to help learners use what they already know to understand what they hear. If teachers suspect that there are gaps in their learners’ knowledge, the listening itself can be preceded by schema building activities to prepare learners for the listening task to e. Without the bottomup processing, the listener would not understand the utterance. But with the bottomup processing alone, his understanding would be limited due to lack of background knowledge. The following material provides a good example: Sam is a little boy, and he is only seven years old. One day he goes to the cinema. It is the first time for him to do that. He buys a ticket and then goes in. But after two or three minutes he es out, buys a second ticket and goes in again. After a few minutes he es out again and buys a third ticket. Two or three minutes later he es out and asks for another ticket. Then the girl in the ticket office asks him, “Why do you buy so many tickets? How many fri