A Study Of Indirect Speech Act Theory And Listening Teaching In Chinese Secondary School English Class

Listening is one of the important language skills in foreign language learning, but listening teaching is often neglected in Chinese secondary school English class. In listening what the listener wants to achieve is an adequate understanding of what the speaker said and what the speaker meant. In order to attain this purpose, we should not only understand the surface meaning of what we hear, but also of the intended meaning. In some instances the intended meaning and the surface meaning match, it is easy for us to understand the utterance. However, in many cases, the intended meaning differs from surface meaning, in which case the intended meaning is an indirect meaning. Searle defined this case as indirect speech act.In order to arrive at the indirect speech act by the speaker, the hearer first has to compute the literal speech act that the expression carries by convention, and then the hearer can derive the indirect speech act by inference. So it is quite reasonable to claim that the essence of listening comprehension is to figure out the speaker's communicative intention on the basis of conceptual meaning of utterances by inference.But the traditional approach of listening comprehension teaching only stays at sentence level. It pays major attention to the forms of language like pronunciation, vocabulary or grammar, etc., and thus ignores the contents of language. The author made a survey on the current situation of listening comprehension teaching in secondary school English class and found:(1) The students have difficulties in identifying the illocutionary forces in indirect speech acts in listening comprehension.(2) The students'ideas of listening comprehension are limited and they influence their listening habits.(3) The students'most difficult problem in listening comprehension is the interpretation of the intended meaning of the speaker.(4) The current listening teaching is not effective in developing the students'listening strategies such as inference.