An Empirical Study Of College English Listening Teaching From The Perspective Of The Markedness Theory

Since the Prague School was founded in the early1930s, the tortuous development of the markedness theory can be roughly divided into four stages. In the river of less than one hundred years of history, markedness theory contributes a lot to language teaching and learning. Therefore, it is of great significance to clarify the context, the development, the impact, and future prospects of the markedness theory.Listening teaching is one of the vital parts in college English teaching and has been getting more and more attention from the applied linguists. In order to improve listening teaching, many scholars do a number of empirical studies from the perspective of linguistic theories. However, they seldom apply the markedness theory to this field.In this thesis, on the basis of previous theoretical studies, the author explored the inter connection between the markedness theory and the college English listening teaching. The author conducted an empirical study of college English listening teaching from the perspective of the markedness theory for two parallel classes from the Information and Economy College of Jilin University of Finance and Economics. The two classes are named as experimental class and controlled class and taught by different teaching methods. First, through the questionnaire, the author understood the subjects’ attitude towards the listening, related theories and skills the subjects grasped. Then the author trained the experimental class from the perspective of the markedness theory in speech sounds, vocabulary, syntax and discourse. Finally, the post-test was conducted to examine the training results. At the meantime, an interview was given to the experimental class in order to figure out the training effect as well as the understanding and mastery of listening skill from the perspective of the markedness theory.The test results indicate that the score of experimental class is significantly higher than that of the controlled class. The students’attitude towards listening teaching and their mastery of listening skills in experimental class have been improved than those of the controlled class. This study widens the applied fields of markedness theory and provides some reference for those teachers who have been laboring themselves at improving students’ listening ability.