The Application Of Lexical Cohesion Theory To English Listening Teaching

As a benchmark to measure college students' comprehensive English competence,the importance of listening comprehension is self-evident.However,students have low listening proficiency and are lack of discourse awareness.There is a big gap between the current situation of poor overall listening level and the requirements of teaching guidelines.Therefore,teachers are required to study and improve this situation.Firstly,this paper reviews the studies of discourse cohesion theory,college English listening teaching,and relevant studies concerning discourse cohesion theory and college English listening teaching at home and abroad.According to Clark & Clark(1997)Listening Comprehension Model and lexical cohesion theory,listeners are asked to focus on cohesive means of "Repetition" and "Co-occurrence" such as simple repetition,complex repetition,synonymy,antonymy,hyponymy,collocation and other cohesive devices in listening discourse,and use cohesive devices to promote "Proposition Achievement" in sentence during the "Construction Process" and "Topic Construction" among sentences during the “Utilisation Process”,so as to help listeners from acquiring sound signals to predicting and inferring listening semantics,and ultimately achieving the meaning of the whole listening discourse.Based on the practical application of the above theories,this study intends to test the following two hypotheses: 1.The listening teaching method guided by Lexical cohesion theory can improve the listening comprehension of non-English majors.2.The new teaching method has different effects on news listening,long conversation listening and passage listening.Two classes of Freshmen in Grade 2018 are taken as the research objects in this paper,of which the mechanical class 1 is the control class and the mechanical class 2 is the experimental class.The control class adopts the traditional listening teaching method,while the experimental class adopts the following three steps in listening teaching: identifying the surface structural information of sounds,words and sentences in listening discourse by using the cohesive means of "Repetition" and "Co-occurrence";identifying the propositional meaning in the "Construction Process" of listening comprehension by using the lexical cohesive chain;and realizing the "Subject content inference" in the “Utilisation Process” of listening comprehension by using the semantic network of Lexical Cohesive Chain.The experimental results are as follows: 1.The total score of the experimental class is higher than that of the control class in Post-test,and post-test total scores are significantlyhigher than that of the pre-test in experimental class.Thus,listening teaching under the guidance of discourse cohesion theory can improve the overall level of College English listening.2.The results in news listening,long dialogue listening and paragraph listening of the experimental class are higher than those of the control class in post-test scores.and in the comparison of the three types of listening of the experimental class itself,the results of the post-test are higher than those of the pre-test.However,the three types of listening tasks show differences in the extent of improvement.Among them,passage listening improves the most,followed by news listening,and long conversation listening improves the least.It can be inferred that the teaching method can promote the listening comprehension of all the three listening tasks,but the improvement of long dialogue listening is the smallest.The reason is that long dialogue is relatively loose and oral in discourse style and discourse structure.And its selection and organization of words are relatively casual and informal.Among these dialogues,there are less distribution and dispatch of synonymy,antonymy,hyponymy and collocation cohesion,and the cohesive chains formed by them are less intensive than those of passage listening and news listening.Based on the findings,this paper puts forward some suggestions for college English listening teaching,aiming at exploring effective listening teaching methods for front-line teachers and providing reference for making up the shortcomings of listening teaching.