An Empirical Study On The Application Of Pragmatic Presupposition Theory To Non-english Major Listening Teaching

Presupposition is a language phenomenon in natural language, which originates withinthe tradition of the philosophy of language. Since Gottlob Frege puts forward the conceptof presupposition, presupposition has been widely discussed by philosophers and linguists.With the deep research on linguistics, presupposition is divided into two types: semanticpresupposition and pragmatic presupposition. In semantic sense, presupposition is arelation in terms of truth value between two sentences. In pragmatic sense, presuppositionis a kind of pragmatic inference, which concerns with the actual linguistic structure ofsentences and contextual factors. It is often defined as an assumption by a speaker or writerabout what is true or already known by the listener or reader.Pragmatic presupposition is applied in language teaching in recent years, such aswriting teaching, translation teaching, etc. However, in aspect of empirical study, fewresearches have been done on listening teaching. This research, on the basis of pragmaticpresupposition theory, is an attempt to investigate the effect of pragmatic presupposition onlistening comprehension. The aim of the research is to provide a feasibility and validity ofteaching method to non-English majors’ listening teaching. Under this purpose, threeresearch questions are proposed.1. What is the students’ current situation of listening learning?2. Whether students in the experimental class gain higher listening proficiency thanthose in the controlled class after one semester’s instruction?3. What are the students’ attitudes in the experimental class towards the listeningteaching based on the pragmatic presupposition theory?Sixty-five non-English major students of two natural classes, Grade2010, BohaiUniversity, participate in this experiment. The experiment lasts for one semester. One ofthe classes (33subjects) is randomly chosen as the experimental class, which gainsteaching instruction on the basis of pragmatic presupposition theory. The other is thecontrolled class receiving traditional teaching method. The two classes are both taught bythe author. Three instruments, including a questionnaire, listening tests and an interview,are employed to collect data. SPSS11.5(the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) isused to analyze the data of the experiment.According to the analysis of the results, major findings are presented as follows.1. Most students in the experiment consider listening as an important part in Englishlearning. Some of them have been aware of using listening strategies, however,most of them meet many difficulties in listening comprehension. 2. The experimental class performs better than controlled class in listeningcomprehension after one semester’s instruction.3. Most students in the experimental class have favorable attitudes towards theapplication of pragmatic presupposition theory to listening teaching. They expect tohave further instruction in listening strategies and skills.This study suggests that pragmatic presupposition can be applied to listening teaching,which can help the students improve their listening proficiency effectively. Thus, at the endof this thesis, the author summarizes pedagogical implications for English listeningteaching and learning. Meanwhile, the limitations of this study and suggestions arediscussed for further research.