The Application Of The Theory Of Cohesion In College Listening Teaching

Listening comprehensive ability, as one of the four vital linguistic abilities to a language learner, serves as the significant tool of everyday communication. Hence experts and scholars have been doing a lot of research and experiments on this ability, without doubts they have gained great achievements on the aspect. One's idea on the feature of listening comprehensive ability has undergone a lot of changes. In the structural linguists and psychologists view, the traditional methodology of listening comprehensive teaching merely stresses on the forms and structures of the language, regarding the flow of listening as a passive and quiet way. In a word, it just considers the listening teaching as the sentence level, which totally neglect the meaning of language as a integral form of communication. So it unavoidably hinders the students'listening comprehensive ability improvement.Since three decades ago functional linguistics and cognitive psychology have got prosper development, so people come to pay increasing attention to the communicative function of language and get the realization that some previously ignored elements are related in the listening comprehension. One of the important realizations is that the comprehension of one mere sentence does not always refer to the comprehension of the though text. So a total new listening methodology is formed:discourse-oriented methodology. Hence the thesis tends to explore listening teaching methodology from a relatively new aspect:how to teach university students'English listening from the application of cohesive devices in discourse.According to the discourse linguists, text linguistics is regarded as a cross-disciplinary field, so it goes no doubts that a lot of relative disciplines and approaches can be related with and be employed. The thesis stresses two sided:influence of cohesive devices on second language listening for university students; application to the university English listening teaching. The structure of the thesis falls into six chapters: introduction is the first one. It serves to raise the present problems in listening teaching and lists the importance of the thesis. Literature review is the second one. It introduces the relative achievements of the renowned researchers and analyses the strong points and the weak points of the employed ideas and knowledge. The theoretical framework is the third one; it presents the five chief types of cohesive devices of Halliday and Hasan's achievements on cohesion and coherence. Methodology serves as the fourth one, which is one of the most important parts of the thesis. It introduces the approaches, the research design and the data collection process employed in the research. That means the author conducts the investigation of a pre-test and a post-test of the 69 freshmen in English major from Huanggang Normal University to testify the effects of the experimental teaching of the experimental group. To be clearer, the thesis is the exploration to demonstrate whether the cohesive means can affect or not the university students' classroom performance, their listening comprehensive ability and processing included. The fifth chapter is to demonstrate the results and discussion of the experiment. So the last one is to draw the conclusion, it sums up the study of the thesis and states the importance and value as well as the shortcomings of the thesis. In this chapter, forwardly the author gives certain realistic suggestions of using cohesion devices to the listening teaching. However, the suggestions are not so certain, there are a lot of left to be improved due to the limitations of the author's knowledge and experiment device.