A Tentative Study Of Application Of Presupposition In The Teaching Of College English Listening

Poor understanding of the context of the listening material is one problem for College English Test sitters. Another problem, a more prominent one, with these sitters is the lack of inferential ability because the correct conjecture or inference is essential to guarantee students' good comprehension of the listening material. In another word, in the process of listening comprehension, if students fail to grasp and decode the information involved in the listening material, it would be quite natural for them to have unsatisfactory performance in the test. Much of the information involved is presupposition, a better understanding of which is critical to students' performance in a listening comprehension test. Therefore, it is practical to apply presupposition to the teaching of college English listening. The concept of presupposition was first put forward by Frege in 1892 in the field of philosophy and later came into linguistics. With the deepening understanding of the concept of presupposition, researchers apply it to more and more practical studies in various registers, such as advertisements, humors, courtroom inquiries, debates and so on. Presupposition can reveal more than what is said, which will contribute to a much deeper and more thorough understanding. With the students of two parallel classes as subjects, this thesis is intended to figure out the answer to the following two questions:1) whether presupposition problem exists in students' listening deficiencies; 2) whether presupposition training may improve the students' listening ability. As for the method, the qualitative analysis and the quantitative methods are combined. In the quantitative part, a pretest, monthly tests, a posttest, and a questionnaire are employed. In the qualitative part, twenty students are interviewed individually. With the analysis and findings, the advantages of presupposition training are showed not only by scores but also by the improvements of the students' communicative competence, reading comprehension and other skills. It proves to be an effective way to enhance the listening competence from the angle of presupposition.This thesis is composed of four chapters.Chapter 1 presents a literature review, which covers the related studies on presupposition, English listening teaching and the matches of them. In addition, it points out the limitations of the previous study and the necessity of the present study.Chapter 2 is a description of the survey study and the experiment including the instruments, the subjects, the research questions, the procedures, and data collection and analysis.Chapter 3 presents the results of the study and discusses them in terms of their implications for language teaching.Chapter 4 provides a conclusion for the present study, presents its pedagogical implications, and also points out its limitations. To end the paper, several suggestions for further research are put forward.