Pragmatics And The Teaching Of Listening Comprehension

Teaching listening is playing a more and more important role in English teaching in colleges. The importance of teaching listening is not only reflected in the increase of the proportion of listening comprehension in various kinds of examinations, but in daily life, the communication is based on understanding of other's utterance. Poor listening comprehension makes many students dare not communicate with others in English even if after more than ten years' study of English. One of the most important reasons is that they cannot understand what the other people are talking about. So we can see the importance of listening comprehension ability in the enhancement and application of students' comprehensive language ability.According to the researcher's survey, most students think their listening ability is poor and they cannot concentrate on the material while they are doing listening exercises. Besides, they are in the habit of paying their attention to single words and details instead of the gist of the passage. At the same time, the survey shows that more and more students begin to put their focus on the enhancement of the comprehensive language ability instead of the improvement of examination skills after they enter the university. This demand requires that teachers should do their best to help the students enhance their comprehensive listening comprehension ability in the limited teaching periods so as to let the students have an improvement in the comprehensive language ability.As a subject that studies the relationships between linguistic forms and the users of those forms, pragmatics has an inseparable relationship with English study. It can also assist the study of listening. This paper attempts to apply conversational implicature in teaching listening to enhance the students' comprehension of conversations, especially the reference of the speaker's real intention. Meanwhile, the researcher uses Speech Act theory, Speech Event theory and Schema theory as supplement in a pedagogical implication to show that the appliance of pragmatics in teaching listening can indeed help students enhance their listening comprehension ability. In a word, applying pragmatics in teaching listening can provide teachers with solid theoretical foundation and more pedagogical methods to help students enhance listening comprehension ability and make college listening courses play a more important role in students' study.