The Application Of Pragmatic Presupposition To Higher Vocational College English Listening Teaching

Listening plays an increasingly significant role in English teaching and learning. Listening is also one important part among the five language skills. It makes up certain proportion in CET band 4 and CET band 6. As economy advances, trade and exchanges between countries increase, it is becoming more and more necessary to understand spoken English in many situations such as face-to-face conversations, telephone calls, business meetings, lectures and so on. Whereas from the listening strategy questionnaire, the author found that most students still think that listening is their weakest skill. Therefore, this thesis mainly focuses on how to improve the listening ability of higher vocational college students.In traditional listening teaching, teachers emphasize the importance of words, phrases or sentences. They did little study about the language theory. They think that lacking of vocabulary or grammatical knowledge account for the inefficiency of listening comprehension, but they neglect the important role of language theory itself.Pragmatic presupposition is a kind of pragmatic inference. When the speaker expresses his idea, he will integrate the potential presupposition with the specific words, phrases and structures in order to achieve successful communication. The process of listening comprehension is to infer the real meaning from the conversation, then make the correct judgment or choice. Therefore, pragmatic presupposition can be considered as the guide for listening teaching.The thesis first introduces the theory of pragmatic presupposition and its application in New Horizon English Listening Course. In the experiment part, the author first did a survey study about listening strategy, and then did two tests. The test objects are two classes in Shandong Agriculture Administers'College, one is the experimental class, the other is the control class. In the pre-test, there is no significant difference found between the two classes. During the following semester, the author only applied pragmatic presupposition to listening teaching and learning in the experimental class. On the basis of this, the author did the post-test. The data collected in the post-test indicates that the experimental class which was trained with the theories of pragmatic presupposition behaved better than the control class. In comparison with their pre-test results, the experimental class made significant improvement while the controlled class has no significant change. The two tests results suggest that listening outcome is proportional to pragmatic presupposition ability. That is the higher the pragmatic ability, the better the listening outcome and vice versa.Based upon the above research, there is intimate relationship between students'pragmatic presupposition ability and listening testing result. Suggestions to improve listening teaching and learning are provided for teachers and students.