The Application Of Pragmatics Theory On College English Listening Comprehension

Chinese foreign language teaching puts an emphasize on building a solid foundation of grammar and focus the accuracy of linguistic form since the 1960s, but ignore the communicative functions of language due to the dominance of structural linguistics. Under this circumstance, many language learners have better capability of phonetics, grammar and vocabulary but their oral English and listening ability are relatively weak. This phenomenon indicates that Chinese foreign language learners focus the grammar knowledge but are deficient in pragmatic ability. Similar problem exists in English listening comprehension and foreign language learners have lower pragmatic competence despite their enthusiasm in learning English.Listening ability constitutes an important part of a language learner's language competence. The listening experiment of Anderson and lynch also shows that, listener's meaning construction is based on the comprehensive resource of information which includes both of schematic knowledge and contextual knowledge (Anderson 1988). However, learners in listening laboratory are viewed as a passive receiver without any related interpretation from teachers, they have difficulty in understanding implications of English conversations, and how to overcome this barrier becomes a crucial problem in the teaching and learning of English listening comprehension.This thesis focuses on the pragmatics theory, through the relevant reference research, analysis, aims at the common problems in listening comprehension, and tries to use the theory of pragmatics such as Grice's conversational implicature and the Cooperative Principle to unscramble the listening part of CET-4. Besides, the CET test in this study should be considered to be a tool for the testing reference, not the final evaluation criterion of academic record. Moreover, Austin and Searle's speech act theory and the Relevant Principle are the future theory which will be employed in this research. On the basis of above-mentioned theories, the researcher implements a tentative experiment, which includes two parts: an inferential study and descriptive study. The subjects are 125 non-English major sophomores from the researcher's classes. They are divided into two groups: experimental group and control group. The result of t-test shows that both tests the researcher designs are significantly correlated with each other, indicating that these two tests can measure subjects' listening comprehension validly.The author proposes several research questions for the descriptive study:(1) How effective is instruction in non-English major's pragmatic awareness?(2) What are the differences in the application of pragmatic knowledge between students in "pragmatic training class" (experimental class) and "teacher-guided class" (control group)? (3) Are there any differences between students with high marks and students with low marks in the cognitive competence of pragmatic knowledge? (4) What the feasibility of applying pragmatic knowledge in the future English listening teaching? In the inferential study, the author puts forward a tentative hypothesis: the systematic application of pragmatics knowledge to traditional listening comprehension can improve learners' understanding of listening material, thus improve their listening ability and marks. Through six months pragmatic training for the experimental class, the author draws a conclusion from the test result between the experimental group and the control group that the pragmatic training has a significant effect on the general listening competence of the experimental group, thus it improves the students' listening ability and proficiency.