The Application Of Indirect Speech Act Theory To College English Listening Teaching

Listening is an important means of communication and is the main channel for people to accept linguistic knowledge and obtain various kinds of information. In college English teaching, the cultivation of students' listening ability is becoming more and more important. However, the present situation regarding the teaching of listening hasn't completely extricated itself from traditional models and the teaching effect is not encouraging. Facing up to these problems, the author believes what is worthwhile for us to explore is how to develop students' listening ability effectively so as to cultivate their pragmatic competence.As a subject that studies specific utterances in specific contexts and the one which focuses attentively on how to understand and use language, pragmatics has an inseparable relationship with English teaching. Searle's Indirect Speech Act Theory (short for ISAT) is one of the most important contents of pragmatics, which focuses its attention on the phenomenon of the illocutionary force of utterances. In real communications, for some purposes, people tend to express their ideas or intentions, say, illocutionary force, indirectly. It is the very connecting point of ISAT and listening teaching. To improve students' understanding of indirect speech acts, the author believes that it is quite necessary to introduce some pragmatic knowledge in college English listening teaching.With an experiment, the thesis attempts to probe into the feasibility of teaching indirect speech acts in college English listening class and tries to find an efficient way of teaching listening comprehension to train students' strategies and competence of inferring the illocutionary force, aiming at figuring out a way that will help develop non-English majors' listening competence to improve their all-round English ability.This thesis begins with an introduction to listening comprehension and the present situation of college English listening teaching. After a systematic analysis of Searle's IS AT, Leech's Politeness Principle (short for PP) and Inference Theory, it comes to an illustration of the importance of indirect speech acts in college English listening teaching. On the basis of ISAT, the author conducted an experiment. According to the results, the author found out that applying ISAT to college English listening teaching was feasible. Finally, the author proposes some applicable pedagogical suggestions on how to cultivate students' pragmatic competence and how to improve the teaching effects of college English listening class.This thesis aims at making a breakthrough in terms of the present ways of listening teaching research. It is hoped that it can shed some light on future studies in the field.