| With the increasing development of China's opening to the world, more and more English learners are needed with high requirement. Listening is an acoustic processing of speech. Thus, listening comprehension is an essential skill for learning and communication. Through the investigation with some English majors, the author found that there are problems in students'listening—they still focus mainly on the recognition of vocabulary and grammar, while understanding of the listening materials. Students can neither understand the logic between sentences nor the main idea of the materials which block their real progress in listening comprehensions. This study aims at exploring the effectiveness of the textual cohesion in TEM-8 listening comprehension.The Cohesion Theory origins from Halliday in accordance with his view on textual function of language. Halliday & Hasan (1976) classifies cohesive devices as grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion with detailed descriptions on each one. At home, researches in this area start from Hu Zhuanglin (1994) and Huang Guowen (1998). Although McCarthy (1991) firstly applied Cohesion Theory in language teaching, there has been no research on the application of this theory in TEM-8 listening teaching.84 students in two senior classes of English majors in School of Foreign Studies in Henan Agricultural University are chosen and divided into Empirical Group (hereafter shortened EG) and Control Group (hereafter shortened CG). Both groups are trained for 18 weeks with the same amount of exercises in the same teaching materials but different guidance in class: the testees in CG are taught in traditional ways while the EG are trained how to apply cohesive devices in listening comprehension. The data collected from pre-test and post-test is analyzed by the SPSS procedure. The Independent Samples T-test of pre-test shows that there is no statistically significant difference between the scores of the EG and CG before the experiment (Sig. = 0.964 > 0.05), and the two groups make similar mistakes; the Independent Samples T-test of the post-test proves that the instruction on textual cohesion improved higher listening quality of the EG than that of CG (Sig. = 0.000 < 0.001).The paper proves that listening quality of the EG improved 2.5476 (total 20) higher than that of CG after four-month period of training. Thus, the use of cohesive devices has a highly statistically significant correlation with the quality of TEM-8 listening comprehension. |
