يادگيري زبان دوم و نظريه طرحواره هاي ذهني

Since psycholinguists such as Branford, Johnson and Anderson highlight the importance of cognitive prerequisites for comprehension and learning, and suggest that the ability to understand and remember is a function of relationship between input and activated knowledge of learner, the present study emphasizes the significance of cognitive activities that enable one to interpret as well as recall information. It also aims to find the role of background knowledge in EFL listening comprehension, and how much listenerʹs comprehension is affected by activated and non-activated knowledge. Whether the listening material is scripted or non-scripted, whether it is authentic or cooked for the learners, it is necessary to provide listeners with the background information needed to understand the message before asking students to listen to a segment of discourse, so that they can develop "script competence". Script competence is the knowledge that the listener and speaker posses in advance about the subject matter of discourse. Teachers should, therefore, take care that(L2) listeners and (LI) speakers on tape share the same knowledge and linguistic scripts, and they must activate the studentsʹ world knowledge or supplement missing knowledge before presenting any listening selections. "Calling into play the students" world knowledge is important if students are to apprehend relations among elements in the message, and to construct an integrated representation of the meaning of the spoken message.