Pragmatic Inference And The Teaching Of College English Listening

It can be said without exaggeration that listening comprehension isthe most important one among the five language skills in communication.And many linguists and foreign language experts also believe that foreignlanguage learning must be started from "listening". In the past, theteaching of college English listening absolutely emphasized the spreadingof language knowledge but now it has evolved to a new stage that bothlanguage ability and communicative ability have been emphasized.However, to most students, it is still difficult to improve their listeningability. Many teachers feel it thorny to train the students'listening ability.Therefore, how we can improve the students'listening ability effectivelyand cultivate their ability to apply language, i.e. pragmatic competence,are the topics that need to be discussed.Pragmatics mainly focuses its studies on two aspects: the productionof discourse and the comprehension of discourse (He Ziran, RanYongping,1998). Pragmatic inference is the process to infer the speakers'conversational implication. Therefore, it is practical to apply pragmaticinference to the teaching of college English listening.The study in this thesis is based on a questionnaire. The subjects are90 sophomores of non-English major students. The content of this studyis a questionnaire on the usage of listening strategies. The data collectedhave been input into SPSS 10.0. The results of the questionnaire representthat there does exist great difficulty in the students'listening study and...