An Empirical Study On The Application Of Pragmatic Inference In English Listening Teaching For Non-English Majors

Listening is one of the most important aspects in English language learning, which is viewed as the foundation for development of speaking, reading, and writing ability. In recent years, college English listening teaching gradually progresses to a new stage that insists on development of both language knowledge and communication skills. Therefore, how to help students to improve their listening comprehension and cultivate their ability of language use are crucial tasks to English teaching and English tests.Pragmatic inference is theoretical foundation in this thesis. And the researcher mainly selects Conversational Implicature theory and Relevance theory as the framework of pragmatic inference. Based on some pragmatic rules, pragmatic inference is in search of utterances meaning derived from literal meanings of words or sentences that are combined with contexts. It gathers up a certain pragmatic theories rather than a single one. English listening is a complicated process and the nature of listening behavior is on the basis of the input communicative discourse mixed with contexts and background knowledge. Thus it is meaningful to apply pragmatic inference into English listening teaching.The researcher chose 82 non-English majors coming from two classes of Shenyang Normal University and regarded one class as the experimental class in which the researcher taught pragmatic inference in English listening classes for 12 weeks. Two questionnaires and an experiment which includes a pretest and a post-test were conducted and SPSS.15.0 was mainly employed to analyze data in detail. There are two research questions in this thesis and they are: What effects does pragmatic inference have on non-English major students’ English listening comprehension? What are non-English major students’ attitudes towards pragmatic inference and English listening study?The results of the research suggest that students in the experimental class have obviously improved their listening comprehension and increased their scores in listening tests after three months’ study. In addition, their consciousness of making pragmatic inference, their self-assessment to their performance and results of making pragmatic inference and the usage of clues when they are listening have been improved as well. And the students are willing to accept it and learn English listening more actively. Therefore, pragmatic inference is an effective way that can be used to improve students’ English listening comprehension. It provides English teachers with a new method in English teaching and it also enriches the theoretical research on the listening strategy and thus adds a multidimensional viewpoint of research in this field.