| Listening comprehension ability, as the focus in Foreign Language Teaching, attracts scholars in China and abroad to have done a lot of researches and experiments that have gained great teaching achievements. Based on structural linguists and psychologists, the traditional listening teaching merely concerns with the forms and structures of language at a sentence level, which neglects the overall meaning that the language conveys, thus inevitably hinders the ability improvement of students’listening comprehension.Since1970s witnessed the prosperous development of functional linguistics and cognitive psychology, scholars have paid increasing attention to the communicative function of language and realized the importance of textural analysis. In linguistics circle, the application of cohesion theory in the teaching of reading, writing, translation, speaking, listening and cloze test has obtained plenteous research achievements, but in which it has not received enough attention that the empirical research on the application of cohesive devices to improve the listening competence of making prediction and inference. Based on Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion theory and the cohesive devices classified by Hu Zhuanglin and Zhang Delu, with CET-4listening samples, the writer of the thesis tries to teach students relevant knowledge of phonological, grammatical and lexical cohesive devices in order to improve their competence of prediction and inference.The thesis is composed of five chapters. To begin with, the development process of cohesion theory, the literature reviews of cohesion theory in listening teaching, as well as the objective of the study are introduced in the thesis. In addition, the characteristics of CET-4listening comprehension and factors influencing students’listening comprehension are analyzed first, then the application of cohesive devices to make prediction and inference of the listening materials is illustrated, including predicting the textural theme and context with lexical cohesive devices before listening, further proving and compensating the former prediction with grammatical cohesive devices while listening, and excluding irrelevant options and inferring true options with lexical and grammatical cohesive devices after listening. Then, a quantitative study and a qualitative study are conducted to80non-English major freshmen in two classes selected from Grade2013in Northeast Forestry University (NEFU) as the research participants within four months from September to December in2013. During the period of the experiment, the participants were divided into Experimental Group (EG) with40students and Control Group (CG) with40students also, who were taught by the same teacher with same amount of exercises and listening materials, however, only experimental group was taught the strategy of making prediction and inference with relevant knowledge of cohesive devices while the control group was not. In the end, the major findings of the thesis are presented with the data analyzed by SPSS17.0as follows:firstly, the results in the pre-test and pre-questionnaire show that there is no apparent competence difference of prediction and inference between EG and CG, but in post-test and post-questionnaire, EG got much higher scores than CG, and a much higher score occurred in EG in post-test and post-questionnaire than in pre-test and pre-questionnaire, all of which indicate that the application of cohesive devices has a significant effect on the improvement of listeners’ prediction and inference competence; secondly, the statistics also illustrates that the participants’ prediction and inference competence with cohesive devices perform best in the section of long conversation, short passage and compound dictation, except short conversation; thirdly, conjunction and reiteration are most significant for the competence enhancement of making prediction and inference compared with other cohesive devices, however, conjunction is more apparent than reiteration. |
PDF Full Text Request