A Study On The Application Of Indirect Speech Acts Theory To Listening Teaching In Senior High School

With the continuous development and improvement of English teaching and research, the ability to understand the listening material becomes increasingly important. According to the author’s investigation,current English listening education overly emphasizes language forms while ignores the actual content of listening material. Therefore, it is necessary to improve students’ perception of the content of utterances and enhance their inferential ability.Searle described indirect speech acts as follows: cases in which one illocutionary acts is performed indirectly by way of performing another. Through the learning of indirect speech acts theory, students have a better understanding of the real intention of the speaker. However, in current English teaching, indirect speech acts theory is seldom applied to listening teaching. Therefore, this thesis was conducted to apply the indirect speech acts theory into high school English listening teaching so as to enhance students’ inferential ability.Two questions discussed in the thesis are : 1) What are difficulties that high school students are facing in English listening comprehension? 2) What are the effects of indirect speech acts theory on high school students ’ listening inferential ability? Three-month experiment was carried out in Shenyang 10 th Senior High School. And two classes were selected as experiment and control class. Before the experiment, both classes took the pre-test and questionnaire, in order to investigate students’ current listening ability and their problems in listening comprehension.During the experiment, indirect speech acts theory was employed in the experiment class and the traditional teaching method was employed in the control class. And after the experiment, both classes took a post-test. The results of experiment were collected and analyzed by the software SPSS 19.0.Through the analysis, the scores of the experiment class were significantly higher than that of the control class. In other words, there are positive effects of applying indirect speech acts theory on senior high students’ inferential ability of predicting behavior, problem-solving and attitude. Therefore, the researcher believes that English teachers should fully realize the importance of indirect speech acts theory in listening teaching and improve students’ inferential ability in this way.