A Study On The Correlation Between Pragmatic Inference And Communicative Listening Test

Listening comprehension is a vital component of the English language learning and provides the base for growth in reading, writing and speaking abilities. So listening ability appears to be crucial in overall language ability and listening comprehension is found in most general proficiency tests and other types of language tests. Likewise, listening comprehension part also holds the balance in College English Test (CET). Nowadays communicative listening tests aiming at measuring students'real communicative competence are widely used in different kinds of tests. Therefore, helping students understand not only the literal meaning but the implied meaning to achieve successful communication becomes an important task for English teaching and testing.Research on pragmatic inference provides very useful theoretical basis for examining listening comprehension. In the past, listening was considered as a simple one-way flow of information to the brain after a sound is heard. But according to pragmatic inference, listening is an interactive process of two-way communication during which the listener's competence of inference plays an important role. Lack of knowledge and competence of pragmatic inference may be an important factor responsible for the inefficiency of listening comprehension. Thus, the failure to comprehend an utterance is not necessarily due to the lack of vocabulary or grammatical knowledge. More often than not, it is the lack of the knowledge of pragmatic inference that blocks the conceptually driven process, making it difficult to carry on two-way communication to understand listening materials.This thesis explores how communicative listening comprehension in general, and communicative listening test design during English teaching and testing in particular, can benefit from pragmatic inference. And then two studies of different nature are undertaken in order to find out the correlation between the competence of students'pragmatic inference and the comprehension outcome. Firstly, a preliminary study is carried out to test the hypothesis that listeners with high linguistic proficiency level will usually show a superior listening comprehension outcome. Result shows that high degree in linguistic proficiency does not necessarily correspond with high scores in listening tests, which implies that listening comprehension is not simply a function of language proficiency. There must be some other factors that contribute to successful listening apart from the linguistic factor. Then, under the belief that students'comprehension can be enhanced by teaching them some theories of pragmatic inference and training their inference competence, another study is conducted, which is based on the hypothesis that listeners who have the high competence of pragmatic inference will get higher scores than those who haven't. The data collected indicates that in comparison with their pre-test results, the experimental group which is trained with the theories of pragmatic inference made significant improvement while the controlled group got lower scores, which suggests that there is correlation between communicative listening outcome and pragmatic inference competence.Based upon the body of research, some guidelines to teachers for constructing listening test during English teaching are provided from the perspective of pragmatic inference.