Listening Teaching With Pragmatic Awareness In Senior Middle School

This thesis is an experimental study on developing students'pragmatic awareness in senior middle school. Listening skills , one of the four goals of English teaching in senior middle school, are considered to be the most difficult part. Listening is drawing more and more attention from the teachers and students,especially after it became part of the NMET.However,the current state of listening teaching in senior middle schools is not optimistic. Most of the teachers and students are making great efforts to practise listening to get a higher score in the exam. This can be called"examination". It isn't developing the students'listening skills. The traditional listening patterns are as follows: Listening—Doing Exercises—Checking the answer—listening again. How to improve English listening teaching and improve the students'listening skills is becoming a serious problem to be settled.Since Morris defined Pragmatics in 1938, Pragmatics has been developing rapidly and used widely. Especially in 1986, Relevance: Communication and Cognition came out, Which promoted its further development.In 2003, New Development in Pragmatics: Relevance, Adaptation, and Memetics (by He Zi-ran) was published,which contributes to the usage in foreign language learning in China.Considering the mental characteristics of the students in senior middle school and their understanding abilities, the author mainly applies Relevance to our English listening teaching. With the help of inference and context, the students can easily understand the speaker's intention and what the speaker wants to communicate. In order to guide the students to use inference and context freely and unconsciously, the author comes up with the model of developing Relevance-strategy Pragmatic Awareness in listening activities. During the experiment , the author introduced some pragmatic knowledge to the students ,and encourage them to use it in their speaking and listening. Besides , the listening is divided into four parts,that is, before listening, during listening, after listening and reaction. After 7 months, the controlled class made obvious progress in their listening skills and strategies,while contrasting with this, the other class had nearly no development.By the experiment,the author tried to answer the following questions:(1) Whether the developing of the students'pragmatic awareness is helpful to improve the students'listening skills; (2)How to help the students develop their pragmatic awareness. Through the survey on the listening concepts and strategies,we draw the following conclusion:(1) The development of Pragmatic awareness will do good to the studnts'listening skills.(2) During the process of listening teaching,we gradually developed the students'sensitivity to the pragmatic knowledge (context and inference in particular) to raise the students'awareness. And this indeed improve the students'listening skills effectively.Therefore, we should create an optimal English learning environment for students to develop their pragmatic awareness and the habit of English thinking to improve English listening learning.