A Research On Context Effect In College English Listening Teaching

Listening, speaking, reading and writing are the four basic skills in language learning. Among the four, listening is the foundation, and the most difficult one to grasp. This is particularly reflected on non-English major students. What makes listening comprehension the most difficult skill to acquire for students? There are many factors which will affect the listening process, and context is the most important one. The study chooses the context as the entry point, because it is crucial in information transmission, logic inference and pragmatic interpretation. In view of the significance of listening comprehension ability in language learning, the author, as a participant in college English teaching, targets the current situation of the college English teaching, chooses part of non-English majors in Hunan Agricultural University as the subject of study, and provides a concrete theoretical analysis and practical exploration.This study uses the Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson,1986) as the guideline, chooses context as the entry point, and gives an in-depth analysis of its effect on students’ listening impediment. The study explains the listening process under the guidance of Relevance Theory, indicating that listening comprehension is actually a process of seeking optimal relevance in the mutual cognitive environment. Being different from other similar concepts, context in Relevance Theory is dynamic, and it makes the listening comprehension dynamic. With the theoretical help, the study establishes a new teaching model, which combines listening teaching with context. In this new model, listening teaching is no longer a simple process of playing record and checking answers but a process of background knowledge acquisition, inference ability improvement and interests’stimulation.In practice, the author has done a comparison test on the above-mentioned new teaching model, choosing99sophomores of non-English majors from Hunan Agricultural University as the subjects. Firstly, the study investigated the current situation of college English Listening teaching by using survey questionnaires, and analyzed the characteristics of the textbooks, the teaching method, approach, and its outcome. The survey result indicates several weaknesses in the conventional teaching method. Secondly, based on the research result, the study has carried out a comparison test revolving around English Listening teaching with context kept in focus. In the test, the experiment class has adopted the new teaching model in which context was integrated, while the control class remained in the traditional one. The research data was analyzed with SPSS. From the data, it is discovered that obvious difference is existing between the experiment class and control class in the performance in listening comprehension of the post-test. The experiment class obtained significantly higher scores in listening test.The study presents the following finding:for the improvement on the teaching method of English Listening, dynamic context in the Relevance Theory plays a key role. English teachers should improve the teaching method in areas of the textbook compilation, the diversity of topics in listening material, and the reality of recordings. Context must be brought into the teaching process to improve students’listening comprehension ability, therefore improve their pragmatic interpretation skill and communication ability.