An Applied Research On Pragmatic Inference Strategy In English Major Listening Teaching

Listening is a critical element in language performance of foreign languagelearners. Through the normal course of a day, listening is used nearly twice as muchas speaking and four to five times as much as reading and writing (Rivers,1984).Comprehension approach believes that “Before teaching learners speak, teachersshould spend a period of time training them to listen…… When the learners’ listeningcomprehension level gets improved, their expressive level will be enhancedaccordingly and naturally，”(Richards, Platt1998:80). So we can see the greatnecessity of improving English majors’ listening comprehensive ability in order toenhance their English language ability.The English Teaching Syllabus for College English Majors issued by theMinistry of Education also needs the students to meet the requirement ofunderstanding the central meaning and intended meaning in the utterance. Listeningcomprehension essentially is to understand the utterance of the speaker. However,utterance understanding is a complicated process of decoding, cognizing andreasoning. Audiology aims at nurturing students’ ability to analyze, reason, judge andreorganize the utterance so that they can grasp the real thought of the speaker, whichrequests the students to possess certain ability to analyze and reason and combinecontext with the real meaning of the utterance. In the audiology, the author finds thatstudents can understand the literal meaning of the utterance, but they cannot analyzeand obtain the deeper implication. Therefore, in order to improve the students’ abilityto understand and communicate, teachers should not only focus on the language itselfand neglect the cultivation for the students to organize and identify the context.The thesis is written based on the Gricean Theory of ConversationalImplicature and the Relevance Theory put forward by Sperber&Wilson as the theoryframe of the pragmatics reasoning, aiming to analyze the effect of the pragmaticsreasoning on listening comprehension and how to direct students to apply this listening strategy in listening process and further to infer the real meaning of thespeaker.This thesis was based on a questionnaire survey combined with experiment.The research was carried out with questionnaire survey, strategy training, listeningtests (pretest and posttest) and was given statistical analysis of the questionnaireresults. The testing subjects were sophomores of English majors who were from thetwo classes of foreign language department of Humanities and Information Instituteof Changchun Technology University. It consisted of three stages：the questionnaire,the pretest, the strategy instruction and the posttest and interview. At the first stage,each subject was given a questionnaire to confirm whether they know how to applypragmatic inference strategy in listening process and to find out what difficulties andbarriers they are confronting with during the listening process. Then a “Pretest”(preliminary test) was given to the two researching groups. At the second stage, theresearcher gave lessons to the experimental group with the guide of pragmaticknowledge about pragmatic inference. The final stage was an experiment test andinterview after the training of pragmatic inference strategy to students, with resultanalysis and qualitative and quantitative analysis given to the data got from the test.The result of research suggested that the listening comprehension score ofexperimental group had been improved dramatically through16weeks of systematictraining of pragmatic inference strategy. The result of the research suggested that theapplication of inference strategy could improve the English majors’ listeningcompetence. Meanwhile, this survey showed that the subjects were facing manydifficulties in listening, and they were so eager to improve their listening competence.According to the interview, due to their good preparation of speculation andpredicting before listening, the students were not as nervous as before and were moreconfident in listening.The limitation of the research lies in the following points: The subjects of theresearch were only66students from two classes of Grade2from Humanity andInformation Institute of Changchun Technology University. This may have effect onthe reliability of the research. Another limitation is that the research was only a relatively short period. While the establishment of students’ consciousness of applyingpragmatic inference strategy in listening comprehension needs a long time, so thislimited researching time might have some effect on the result of the research. Inaddition, the research only covered conversation and passages from the test paper ofTEM4, not including news broadcast. If more forms of material had been covered todo the research, the effect of applying pragmatic inference strategy on listeningcomprehension would have been clearer. The author hopes that this study will drawteachers’ attention on the application of pragmatic inference strategy in listeningcomprehension so as to effectively guide future English major listening teaching.