Aresearch Onapplying Indirect Speechacts Theory To Teaching English Listening In High Schools

In high school English teaching, to cultivate students'listening comprehension ability is becoming more and more important. In the standards of English curriculum of high schools, listening and speaking are mentioned as the fundamental skills in learning foreign languages; inferring and understanding the speakers'intended meaning is one of the objectives of listening skills. By consulting about 50 English test papers of the university entrance examinations, the author found that the percent of inference questions in listening part is more than 20%, which require high listening comprehension ability to make choices. The author also made a survey on the current teaching and learning situations of listening comprehension in high school English class and found out that: the students'cognition of listening comprehension is limited and their difficulties mainly lies in the interpretation of the intended meaning of the speakers, and that influences their listening comprehension ability. Nevertheless, the current listening teaching usually stays at the level of micro-linguistic meaning comprehension, but ignores the real meaning of the contents and the listening skills. Thus, it is not effective in developing the students'listening comprehension ability, especially their inference strategies.Applying indirect expressions is a universal phenomenon in language communication, and Searle defines indirect speech acts as the phenomenon which focuses on the illocutionary forces of utterances. The author holds that indirect speech acts theory could help high school students improve their listening comprehension ability. However, the literature review shows that there are few researchers studies English listening teaching by the view point of indirect speech acts theory. The previous studies mainly pay attention to the interpretation of indirect speech acts but lack researches of listening comprehension teaching by applying indirect speech acts theory. In particular, the empirical research is very limited. Based on the study of indirect speech acts theory and the knowledge of listening comprehension, the author draws on the way of action research to apply indirect speech acts theory to listening comprehension teaching in high schools. The objective is to testify the feasibility of applying indirect speech acts theory to high school English listening comprehension; at the same time, help the high school students improve their listening comprehension ability and enhance their communicative competence. The findings indicates that the knowledge of indirect speech acts theory can help the learners interpret the speaker's intended meaning effectively and thus improve their listening comprehension ability. Moreover, the author provides some ways and suggestions on teaching listening comprehension efficiently. The main methods include cultivating students'inference strategy; enriching the learners'background knowledge; making full use of English tones; designing various tasks in different listening stages; organizing effective listening activities; and making full use of the multi-media etc.