The Application Of Laurence R. Horn's Q-and R-Principles In College Listening Teaching

Listening is the most important among the four language learning skills for language learning. Therefore, how to improve a foreign language learner's listening proficiency becomes a most important issue. Nevertheless,for most teachers, a listening class simply means word-list explanation, cassettes playing as well as answer checking. They utterly neglect the nature of listening comprehension—while listening, the hearer not only receives the message passively, but also actively processes the received message which requires both the linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge.Now that listening is demonstrated to be an active process, the importance of the hearer's role in listening practice cannot be ignored. However, , many teachers tend to encounter such a phenomenon in teaching that sometimes even if the listening materials are simple; students understand every word of the listening materials and still come up with the wrong answer. Why is this? Recent studies reveal that the occurrence of such problems chiefly results from the students'lack of the ability to analyze and grasp the deeper meaning of the speaker. In the latest reform, listening comprehension takes a much larger portion than before in CET4 and 6(35% out of 100%, which saw a 15% rise). To explore an efficient way to change the current dilemma, the author in this thesis implemented Laurence R Horn's Q-and R-Principles in listening classes to demonstrate whether Horn's Q-and R-Principles could shed some light on listening teaching in China.In the thesis, for the very first time across the country, the author adopted an empirical researching method, carried out in Zhejiang Normal University. After a twelve-week experiment, comparisons were made to reveal that though both classes (one was the subject class, the other the control class) made improvement in listening comprehension, the subject class achieved a better result. Out of the experiment the author finds: Non-English majors could achieve a better understanding of English if equipped with Laurence R Horn's Q-and R-Principles. This thesis is expected to pave a new road for FLT listening teaching in China.