The Application Of Indirect Speech Act Theory To Vocational College English Listening Teaching

Listening is an important means for people to communicate with each other and itis also a main channel for people to get linguistic knowledge and accept various kindsof information. During the listening process, all the listener wants to get is the fullunderstanding of what the speaker said and what the he/she meant. So, in order toachieve this purpose, we should not only get the literal meaning of the utterance, butalso the intended meaning of the utterance. We can see that in some instances, thesurface meaning of the utterance can well match the intended meaning, it is easy for usto understand the utterance. However, in many cases, the intended meaning is differentfrom the surface meaning, in which case the intended meaning is an indirect meaning.Searle defines this case as indirect speech act. In order to arrive at the indirect speechact by the speaker, the hearer should first compute the literal speech act carried by thesentences, then the hearer can derive the indirect speech act by inference.However, the traditional listening teaching approach in vocational collegelistening comprehension teaching only focuses on the sentence level, such as thepronunciation, the words and the grammar, but ignores the contents of the language. Sothe author carried out a survey on the current situation of listening comprehensionteaching in vocational college and found:(1) Vocational college students’ ability to identify the illocutionary forces isweak;(2) Vocational college students’ attitude towards listening comprehension is veryactive and their understanding about listening comprehension is limited;(3) Vocational college students’ understanding of indirect speech act theory isvery limited, which influences the improvement of their listening ability;(4) Vocational college students’ most difficult problem in listeningcomprehension is the interpretation of the intended meaning of the utterance;The author thinks the indirect speech act theory can help English learner improvetheir listening comprehension, but from the literature review we can see that there are only a few researches about the indirect speech act and listening teaching. What’s more,there researches mainly focus on how to understand the indirectness of the study butlack of systematic analysis for teaching listening comprehension guided by the indirectspeech act theory.So, the author did some researches on indirect speech act theory and listeningteaching and drew the conclusion that indirect speech act theory is useful to improvelearners’ inference ability in listening comprehension. Above the discussion, the authorgives some suggestions for listening comprehension teaching, which include cultivatingstudents’ pragmatic competence, making full use of the multi-media, encouraginginteraction and collaboration between students and teachers, designing various listeningtasks and organizing effective listening activities.The purpose of the paper is to apply the indirect speech act theory to vocationalcollege listening comprehension, which aims at improving students’ listeningcomprehension ability and thereby enhance their communicative competence, aiming atimproving the level of English listening teaching in vocational college.