Stylistic Analysis And College English Listening Teaching

People use language to communicate and interact with each other. Language interaction is performed in certain circumstances, to certain people, and with certain purposes. Appropriate use of language is considered the key to effective communication, so it requires people to use different varieties of language in different contexts. As a branch of linguistics, which applies the theory and methodology of modern linguistics to the study of style, English stylistics concerns a detailed study of language in different styles. It is necessary for college students to learn theory of stylistics and methods of stylistic analysis to raise their stylistic awareness so as to response appropriately to various types of spoken English and improve their English competences.English listening comprehension plays a significant role in the teaching of English skills to college students and therefore merits people's attention. Spoken English is one of the major styles of the English language, and there are still many varieties according to the changes in language use. Native speakers, who have acquired many years a great deal of intuitive knowledge about the different styles of English, have the instinctive sense to adjust their styles to different types of situation. But the Chinese EFL students, especially college English learners, are weak in acquiring the appropriate response to various types of spoken utterances. Stylistics may help them to overcome this difficulty. And studying the linguistic features of spoken English is helpful for listening comprehension for the reason that students at higher levels who are able to understand the information explicitly conveyed in a piece of listening material can also appreciate some of the more subtle, implicit'messages'and they may go one step further and try to analyze its style and assess its impact. Thus, they are trained not only to understand what a speaker is intended to convey, but also how he is going about it, what the characteristics of his speech are, what effect these have on them as hearers. To do this, the students will obviously have to be highly proficient in spoken English; and they will engage in stylistic analysis to help them. It is well known that the final purpose of college English teaching is to improve students'communication skills both in written and spoken English. Besides English reading, many college teachers of English attempt to use the theory of stylistics and the method of stylistic analysis to the writing, listening and speaking instruction. So this thesis analyzes the relationship between the stylistics and college English listening and discusses the stylistic features of listening materials in college English.With the help of the stylistic analysis, we know that the English language is in fact a complex of many different varieties of language in use in all kinds of situations. And this method can also help us to acquire a "sense of style" in English listening comprehension, this sense may not like the intuitive knowledge of these native listeners of English which has acquired for many yeas, but in the four or longer years of learning procedure college students can speed up the process of acquisition of the listening ability by the method of stylistic analysis. With its practical analysis, it is useful to enhance the understanding of the ways in which impressions, effects and meanings are reflected in the listening comprehension.This thesis consists of six parts, including the introduction and conclusion. The introduction part points out the value of stylistics and stylistic analysis in college English listening comprehension and states why I choose this topic as my subject of study.Chapter Two is the literature review, which briefly discusses the definition, content and the development of stylistics. After giving some information about the procedures of stylistic analysis, this chapter presents the values and influences of stylistic analysis in English listening comprehension and the previous study in this field.Chapter Three gives a brief introduction to Halliday's Systemic Functional Theory which is the basis of the systemic functional stylistics. In stylistic studies, Halliday held the view of "style as meaning potential". Holding Halliday's Systemic Functional Theory can bring a new angle to stylistic analysis research; this thesis then analyzes the procedure of stylistic analysis which has three steps:linguistic description, textual analysis, and contextual factors analysis. And this paper adopts this procedure to our needs in college English listening of investigating its style.Chapter Four analyzes the relationship between stylistics and listening comprehension by comparing the differences between spoken language and written language in English from stylistic perspective, and then probes into the role of listening in L2 acquisition, the process of listening comprehension and the nature of English listening comprehension; it also presents the difficulties in college English listening comprehension.Chapter Five discusses the influence of stylistic analysis on improving college students' competence in English listening through an analysis of the stylistic features of listening materials. First of all, the thesis emphasizes the importance of cultivating student's ability of stylistic analysis once again, but it focuses on four detailed parts such as a better understanding of sounds, word choices, grammatical rules, discourse and the speaker's attitude in listening. In addition, this chapter selects some real-life conversation, English radio news, and public speech which are different varieties in relation to genre, and analyzes their unique stylistic features by using the procedure of stylistic analysis as the basic framework respectively, which mainly concentrates on the phonological, lexical, syntactic and semantic levels and every linguistic description of the variety is initiated from its functional perspective and its contextual environment.In Chapter Six, the conclusion part, the major work of this thesis is summarized; implications for English language learning and teaching are discussed and limitations of this thesis are pointed out.