Abstract

English listening is seen as a vital means of linguistic input for Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners, which lays a solid foundation for English learning and communication with English speakers. Besides, with increasing of scores of the listening part in the newly-reformed CET-4 and CET-6 (CET refers to college English test in China and both tests are the evaluation criteria of non-English majors’ English proficiency), it is urgent to improve non-English majors’ listening abilities in language teaching. However, students find listening to English stressful and painful and it is hard for them to process information quickly enough when listening. Meanwhile, their listening abilities cannot be improved effectively by the traditional English listening teaching methods. Researchers at home and abroad have discussed listening strategies, but seldom study the combination of lexical chunks theory and schema theory in improving non-English majors’ listening. Therefore, this research first proposes a lexical chunks schema-oriented listening teaching method which can effectively improve non-English majors’ listening abilities and then conducts an empirical study to verify its effectiveness. As the lexical chunks schema-oriented listening teaching method suggests, activities about memorization, recognition and reconstruction of lexical chunks, activation of the existed schema and building up new schema should be carried out in pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening in the listening class.

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