A Critical Review Of Listening Comprehension Approaches--With An Emphasis On The Pragmatic Interpretation Of Spoken English Discourse

Listening competence figures as an essential measure in examining a foreign language learner's overall linguistic sense and communicative competence, and, therefore, the study of listening teaching receives extensive attention from linguists and foreign language teaching experts. This thesis presents an introduction of and a comparison between the traditional and pragmatic as well as cognitive schema approach to listening comprehension so as to work out a complementary strategy for listening teaching.The traditional listening comprehension models usually consist of what we refer to as the bottom-up, the top-down and dictogloss model. The bottom-up model or view holds that hearers should go all out to remember linguistic elements; the top-down view suggests hearers exploiting both his internal linguistic knowledge(including phonology, vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and even text knowledge of the target language) and non-linguistic knowledge(such as cultural background information and world experience) to interpret the received message. Dictogloss model advocates an integration of the above 2 approaches.From a pragmatic perspective, the author tries to elucidate the fact that listening comprehension takes as its subject the problem of how particular utterance meanings are conveyed and decoded in specific contexts of situation. To its solution, CP, Conversational Implicature, PP and Speech Act Theory are likely to take effect. Especially Relevance Theory of pragmatics succeeded in relating the received message to the hearer's cognitive context.To deepen the discussion, the author has also introduced briefly schema theory to strengthen the cognitive aspect of listening comprehension. Briefer inadequate as it is, it intends to pave the way for further researches.