A Study Of Correlation Between Discourse Analysis Competence And Listening Comprehension Of English Majors

Discourse analysis theory was born in1960s, and since its birth, manyresearchers at home and abroad have been actively engaged in how to apply discourseanalysis theory to the actual teaching research and practice. Chinese researchers fordiscourse analysis research began in1990s, committed to combine discourse analysistheory with English teaching so as to study the application of it to language teaching.Therefore, more and more English teachers applied discourse analysis to Englishreading, writing and translation teaching, whereas few applied it to listeningcomprehension teaching.Traditional approach of listening comprehension teaching only stays at sentencelevel; most teachers usually focus on the analysis of language forms, such aspronunciation, vocabularies and grammar, rather than the discourse-oriented semanticintegration. Listening is a communicative process that listeners strive to understandthe meaning of the whole discourse, which is the information carrier. The subject oflistening is the discourse rather than the isolated words or sentences, and listenersshould understand meaning on the basis of the whole discourse.This thesis is an empirical study on the correlation between English majors’discourse analysis competence and their listening comprehension performance; thesubjects are fifty-six second-year students of the School of Foreign Languages,Shenyang Normal University. And it aims at exploring English majors’ general levelof discourse analysis competence and the relationship between discourse analysis competence and listening comprehension performance. After analyzing andresearching on the data from questionnaires and tests, the author got the followingconclusion: the majority of students had a relatively low level of discourse analysiscompetence, and there was a significant positive correlation between discourseanalysis competence and listening comprehension performance. Finally, proposals forimproving English majors’ discourse analysis competence were deeply analyzed anddiscussed, and pedagogical implications were also proposed.