An Empirical Study On The Relevance Between Pragmatic Markers And Academic Listening Comprehension In English

Academic lecture is an oral presentation intended to teach people about a particular subject by a university or college teacher. Academic listening, the listening of academic lectures in university classes, plays an important role in student’s academic success. It has aroused many scholars’interests (Richards,1983; Flowerdew. 1994; Young,1994). In the past few decades pragmatic markers have also been studied and investigated for different research goals (Schiffrin,1987; Blackmore, 1987; Redeker,1990; Brinton,1996; Fraser,1996). The present study uses Relevance theory as its theoretical framework, explores the functions of pragmatic markers in academic lectures from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics and verifies the relevance between pragmatic markers and academic listening comprehension through teaching experiment.This study makes a 3-week 32-teaching-period experiment on 32 college students from one university in Zhejiang province. By means of pre-and post tests and also questionnaires, this study arrives at the following findings:(1) The results of the questionnaire shows that most participants regard academic lectures as the most difficult listening materials (62.1%) and believe that learning and mastering pragmatic markers contributes to their improvement in listening comprehension (65.5%). (2) The analysis of pre- and post-tests indicates that the teaching experiment contributes to the participants’comprehension of main topic, pragmatic information and textual structure of academic lectures, but does not contribute to the comprehension of detail information in the experimental group. (3) The significant difference in the pre-and post-test results of the experimental and control group suggests that the improvement is ascribed to the teaching experiment. With all the above findings considered, this study concludes that the awareness of pragmatic markers facilitates the comprehension of academic lectures, that is the knowledge of pragmatic markers plays a positive role in academic listening comprehension. And it is imperative to involve the instructions of pragmatic markers in L2 listening comprehension class.