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.

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