Discourse Analysis And The Teaching Of Listening Comprehension

Listening comprehension is far more than understanding what words or sentences mean. In fact, "three related levels of discourse processing appear to be involved in listening: propositional identification, interpretation of illocutionary force, and activation of real world knowledge." (Richards 1983)Drawing on Rost's analytic taxonomies of listening skills (1990) and somepreliminary talks with colleagues as well as students, I devised and conducted aresearch primarily to find out our students' major deficiencies in listening comprehension.The research shows, among other things, that the majority of students are exposed to the listening input in class without being fully "ready", that is, without being confident and activated. This calls for better-designed pre-listening activities to keep them from being either too nervous or too relaxed.The research also reveals students' prevalent concern with vocabulary, which, along with a pronounced problem of obsession with one difficult word in real-time processing, is indicative of their over reliance on bottom-up processing. Next to the overriding concern with vocabulary, many students voice their need to develop listening strategies, in particular prediction and inference.This paper is then an attempt to tap some relevant ideas in Discourse Analysis, namely, important notions in Speech Act theory, Speech Event theory and Schema theory, to address the problems identified in the research. Speech Event theory and Schema theory are exploited in designing purposeful pre-listening activities and providing effective training in prediction. Speech Act theory and Schema theory are exploited in discussing how to develop students' listening strategy of inference. Apart from numerous examples, two case studies are presented to manifest the positive effect of applying ideas in Discourse Analysis in the teaching practice of students' listening comprehension.In conclusion, a discourse perspective of and approach to the teaching of listening comprehension may provide teachers with insights and resources, and more important, may yield facilitated processing of information and improved performance in comprehension on the part of learners.