A Study On Application Of Indirect Speech Acts Theory In College English Listening Instruction

Listening comprehension has always been playing an important role in Englishteaching and testing. And with the constant reform of college English teaching,listening should be paid more attention beyond all doubt. It is college Englishteacher’s responsibility to cultivate students’ listening comprehension ability.However, the current situation of listening instruction is less satisfactory and needs tobe improved. To solve this problem, the author thinks it is of great importance toimprove students’ listening comprehension and cultivate their pragmatic competence.In order to improve the students’ pragmatic competence, college Englishteachers need to teach students the knowledge of pragmatics in the first place.Pragmatics is the study of meaning in context. It deals with particular utterances inparticular situations and is especially concerned with the various ways in which manysocial contexts of language performance can influence interpretation. Pragmaticsplays a vital role in English teaching all the time. Searle’s indirect speech acts theoryis an important theory in pragmatics and it mainly talks about the illocutionary forceof the utterance. In communication people usually express their intentioneuphemistically. The real intention of a speaker can usually not be expressed literally.After understanding the literal meaning, the hearer still needs to infer speaker’sintention from communication context. And this is the connecting point of listeningcomprehension and indirect speech acts theory. In order to find out the real meaningof the indirect language, it is necessary for the teachers to offer some pragmaticknowledge to students in college English listening instruction.The thesis tries to testify the feasibility of applying indirect speech acts theory tocollege English listening instruction with an empirical research. The author alsoattempts to work out a practical and efficient way in the teaching of listeningcomprehension and cultivate students’ listening strategies and skills to get theillocutionary force, and to find a way to help enhance non-English majors’ listeningskills and then improve students’ English comprehension. The thesis starts with the literature review of listening comprehension whichinvolves the present situation of college English listening instruction and thetheoretical basis of Searle’s indirect speech acts theory and the related theory, Leech’spoliteness principle and inference theory. Considering the benefit brought by indirectspeech acts theory applied in college English listening teaching, the author carried outan experiment. And the author found that it is feasible to apply indirect speech actstheory to college English listening teaching based on the research. At last, the authorput forward some practical implications and suggestions on improvement of bothteaching and learning.The thesis aims at improving listening teaching method and helping students tomake progress in listening comprehension. It is hoped that it can provide someimplications for future researches.