The Application Of Discourse Analysis To The Teaching Of Listening Comprehension For English Majors

Listening, as the primary means of second-language acquisition, has been a great concernof English majors. But listening teaching skill has not received much attention as weexpected.Traditional approach of listening teaching mainly stays at sentence level and muchattention is paid to grammar and vocabulary. Much work is done on repeated tape playing andsentence translation of listening materials. But listening comprehension is not a passive butan active activity which involves receiving and reframing the speaker’s messages, that isconstructing meanings on expectations, inferences, intentions, prior knowledge and selectiveprocessing of the input. Therefore, in the listening process, the speakers’ idea should beexplored not only from the surface sentences, but also from the background knowledge, thecohesion and coherence, the context, etc. Hence, the listening teaching should bediscourse-oriented rather than sentence-oriented.In the past60years, discourse analysis has founded its own system of theories, studyingthe organization of language above the sentences or clauses, that is, language use in socialcontexts, and particularly interaction between people, related with theories of cohesion,coherence, context and genre. Much research has been done on the application of thediscourse analysis to the teaching of reading, writing and translating. But the research workon the application of the discourse analysis to the listening teaching is rare. This studyattempted to apply the discourse analysis to listening teaching and tried to testify itseffectiveness by answering the following three questions:1) Are students’ listening scoresco-related with their consciousness and strategy on using discourse analysis while listening?If yes, to what extent?2) What is the effect of discourse analysis training on students’listening strategy?3) Is the approach of discourse analysis more effective than thesentence-oriented listening teaching in improving students’ listening scores?Followed by a questionnaire to look into students’ listening strategies and knowledgeaccumulation out of classroom, the author conducted an experiment in two classes taught bythe author. Class one works as the Control Class, class two as the Experimental Class. In theControl Class, the traditional sentence-oriented teaching method was used, while in the Experimental Class the teacher applied discourse analysis theories to listening teaching. Twotests were organized respectively before and after the experiment in the two classes. Lastly aninterview was conducted with eights of the students in the Experimental Class. The results ofthe questionnaire, the pretest, the posttest and the interview were analyzed quantitatively andqualitatively with SPSS16.0. The study results demonstrate that:1) Students’ listening scoresare closely related with their consciousness and strategy use of discourse analysis in listeningprocess. Their correlation co-efficiency is at a relatively high level.2) The consciousness andstrategy of discourse analysis application in listening can be trained in classroom teaching.And the training produced great effects.3) Experiment of one term actually improvedstudents’ strategy in listening and in turn, led to higher test scores, which demonstrates thatthe approach of discourse analysis is more effective than the traditional sentence-orientedteaching method.According to the findings of the research, the author brought up suggestions for listeningteaching correspondingly, and pointed out the limitations of this research and proposals forthe future study.