The Impact Of Pragmatic Markers As Strategies On English Listening Of Junior High School Students

Listening is one of the most basic and important skills in oral communication(River & Temperly,1978).Pragmatic markers,as non-truth propositions in speech dialogues,play an important role in communicating intentions and guiding dialogues.How to integrate pragmatic markers as strategies into the current English listening classroom teaching has attracted much attention.This study focuses on quantitative research,supplemented by interviews.A total of 70 students from the case school were selected as the research participants for 12 weeks of pragmatic markers as strategies(PMS)training,in order to explore the impact of PMS on junior high school students’ English listening comprehension competence and listening attitude.Based on the literature,listening comprehension competence is divided into three sub-skills,namely,word recognition skills,information comprehension skills,and information inference skills.The research questions are as follows:(1)What is the impact of PMS on junior high school students’ English listening comprehension competence?(2)What is the impact of PMS on the listening comprehension competence of students in different levels?(3)What is the influence of PMS on junior high school students’ listening attitudes?The findings are as follows:(1)Overall,PMS can significantly promote the three sub-skills of listening comprehension competence.Among them,there is the greatest impact on information inference skills,followed by information comprehension skills,and finally word recognition skills;(2)There are differences in the impacts of PMS on different level students.For the high-level group: PMS can promote students’ information inference skills significantly,but there is no significant impact on information comprehension skills and word recognition skills.For the medium-level group: PMS can significantly promote three sub-skills of listening comprehension competence.Among them,there is the greatest impact on information inference skills,followed by information comprehension skills,and finally word recognition skills.For the low-level group: PMS have the greatest impact on students’ information inference skills,followed by word recognition skills.There is no significant impact on information comprehension skills;(3)PMS has a significant positive influence on junior high school students’ English listening attitude.Among them,it plays a significant positive role in reducing students’ English listening anxiety and boosting their listening interest.In this study,the impact of PMS on junior high school students’ English listening comprehension competence and listening interest is explored.To a certain extent,it proves that there is a positive impact to link PMS with the current junior high school English listening teaching.