A Study Of The Effects Of Students' Pragmatic Knowledge On CET4 Listening Comprehension

CET4, which is the short form of College English Test Band 4, has long been recognized as a nationally standardized English test designed by the National College English Testing Committee under the direct sponsorship of the Higher Education Department of the Ministry of Education. It is considered as one of the most important tests to check college students'command of English. And the criteria for CET4 are based on the Testing Syllabus compiled by the Higher Education Department of the Ministry of Education for both English testing and teaching. The purpose of CET4 is to examine the English proficiency of undergraduate students in China and to ensure that Chinese undergraduates reach the required English levels specified in the Testing Syllabus (Testing Syllabus, 2006:1). CET4 has experienced an innovation since 2006, from which the proportion and importance of listening comprehension have been increased from 20% to 35%. The newly innovated CET4 includes three sections in its listening comprehension: short dialogues and long conversations, passages and compound dictations. The new CET4 put more emphasis on the students'communicative ability rather than their grammatical ability, thus, questions designed to test the participants'ability of inference or context understanding are added. In order to meet this new requirement, college teachers should adjust their ways of listening comprehension teaching in the following two ways: firstly, to further study the characteristics of new CET4, focusing on its major purpose; secondly, to find the most practical way to help the students get high marks by studying related theories that guide the test, and to integrate the findings into listening comprehension classes in future.The theories that used to guide this thesis are pragmatic competence and pragmatics. Chomsky (1963) first raised the notion"competence"in his book Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, distinguishing"competence"and"performance. Competence refers to a language learner's basic understanding of the whole language system, or his inter language knowledge or grammar, while performance is the real practice of language in certain or given settings or situations. This competence can also be called linguistic competence, and Chomsky subdivided it into pragmatic competence and grammatical competence. The grammatical competence means a person's ability to correctly use a language, it is about the accuracy of language forms, while pragmatic competence refers to a person's ability to appropriately use a language in specific settings, and it is something about the appropriateness of language. Another linguist Leech (1983) believes that there are differences between communicative linguistics and pragmatic linguistics. And Thomas then defines pragmatic competence based on Leech understanding that: pragmatic competence refers to the ability to efficiently use the language for the realization of certain aims and the ability to understand language in context. (Thomas 1983:94) Linguistic knowledge, like pronunciation, vocabularies, sentence structures, is the basic for communication, while pragmatic knowledge, which enables one to understand the real meaning of speakers in a given context, is what makes our communication vivid and beautiful.Besides, pragmatics, which is originated from the philosophy of language and is regarded as a modern branch of linguistic, is now growing rapidly in contemporary linguistics. It is the study of the relations between language and context that are the basic to an account of language understanding. Pragmatic theories like"Speech Act Theory","Indirect Speech","Cooperative Principle","Politeness Principle"and"Relevance Theory"have played in great impact on listening comprehension in CET4.As what has been mentioned above, this thesis aims to answer the following two major questions:(1) What are the effects of students'pragmatic knowledge on their results of CET4 listening comprehension?(2) What are the best ways to teach students pragmatic knowledge in class? The first research question mainly focuses on the effects that students'pragmatic knowledge has on the results of CET4 listening comprehension. Briefly speaking, whether or not the students will get better scores in CET4 listening comprehension after acquiring pragmatic knowledge in classes. The second question aims to work out practical methods or ways for teaching non-English major students'pragmatic knowledge in class.This thesis is divided into five chapters.Chapter One briefly introduces the purpose of this study by raising two major researching questions, and talks about the significance of the study from both theoretical and practical points of view. The organization of this thesis is also included in this chapter.Chapter Two presents an overview of related literatures, which serves as the research background and theoretical framework of the study for the next chapters. The major theories reviewed in this chapter are pragmatic competence, pragmatic theories, such as Speech Act Theory, Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle and Relevance Theory.Chapter Three is about the methodology used for this thesis, including the research questions, research subjects, instrumentations and how the data are collected and analyzed in this thesis.Chapter Four mainly evaluates the data gathered through the case study and presents the results by giving answers to two research questions, and then it thoroughly discusses major findings from the results.Chapter Five further works on the implication for future pedagogy, and discusses the limitations of this thesis and suggestions for further study.