A Study On Listening Comprehension Teaching For Non-English Majors Based On Relevance Theory

Listening comprehension as a basic language skill is of great importance in theprocess of English learning. Many scholars have studied listening from severalperspectives, such as psycholinguistics, second language acquisition, and pragmatics andso on. However, due to the imperfection of these studies, there is still a great space for theimprovement of listening teaching.Relevance Theory opens a new perspective for the research of listening teaching. Thispaper interprets listening comprehension based on Relevance Theory with the emphasis oncontext and inference. According to Relevance Theory, context is the foundation oflistening, and inference is the core of listening comprehension. Therefore, from the view ofcontext and inference, it develops a teaching model which is composed of three stages:pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening.Under the guidance of Relevance Theory, this paper aims to answer three researchquestions:(1) Does the teaching model based on Relevance Theory enhance students’self-efficacy in doing listening comprehension?(2) Can the teaching model improvestudents’ listening comprehension achievements from the view of context and inference?(3)What is the effect of this model on the high and low-level group respectively?In order to find out the answer, this paper adopts the questionnaire, experiment andinterview as research instruments. The63subjects of two classes are all non-Englishmajors from Bohai University. One class is randomly chosen as experiment class, the otheris control class. Both of the two classes are required to fill the questionnaires and attend inthe pretest and posttest. The experiment class is divided into high and low-level group. Aninterview is conducted on the high and low-level group after the experiment.The data results show that first, this teaching model to some extent can enhancestudents’ self-efficacy though the effect is not obvious; second, this model can remarkablyimprove students’ listening comprehension achievements; third, it has positive effect onboth the high and low-level group; however, the effect on the high-level group is moreobvious. It is concluded that this teaching model is of great help and enjoyed by thestudents.