Application Of Indirect Speech Act Theory To Teaching English Listening Among The Students In Higher Vocational Schools

Listening, as one of the four skills in language learning, is an important factor affecting students’language proficiency. In listening classes, students can get linguistic knowledge and practice listening and speaking skills. As for the students in higher vocational schools, in order to meet the needs of society and efficiently communicate with others in English, improving their listening competence is becoming more and more important. Without good listening competence, learners may not understand the illocutionary force from others’ words. However, under traditional teaching methods, students still stay in poor situation in learning English listening, which should be paid more attention by teachers.In order to change this situation, the researcher tried to apply Searle’s Indirect Speech Act Theory to teaching English listening. The theory is one part of Pragmatics and it is related to the intended meaning of utterances. In daily communication, students often express their intentions by using some indirect languages or illocutionary forces. Therefore, the researcher adopts some pragmatic knowledge of the theory to enhance the students’ listening competence, especially inference competence.This study mainly focuses on three questions. First, the researcher attempts to know about the students’current situation in learning English listening with questionnaire and the former interview. Then, with the teaching experiment, the researcher adopts listening tests and tries to test the assumption that application of Indirect Speech Act Theory to teaching English listening is able to help improve the students’ listening comprehension competence. During the experiment, the students are required to record their feelings and ideas with diaries after each listening class. At last, the researcher conducts the latter interview and further finds out the students’attitudes towards the application of the theory in English class.The results of this study show that students in higher vocational schools regard vocabulary and meaning as the two most important factors affecting their listening competence. They lack of inference competence to predict the intended meaning from the surface meaning of sentences. Under traditional listening teaching methods, they only focus on each word or meaning of each sentence, but they rarely use the efficient methods to understand the illocutionary force in the utterance.Compared with those who use the traditional ways in listening, after the application of Indirect Speech Act Theory, inference competence of students in experiment group is to some extent improved. The results of diaries and the latter interview prove that students in higher vocational schools are willing to accept the application of the theory to teaching English listening. They think the theory is able to help improve their listening comprehension competence.Based on the results, the researcher suggests applying the theory to guide teachers’ further teaching listening and to improve students’inference competence. This study aims to do some research in teaching English listening among students in higher vocational school due to the current situation of their listening competence, hoping to provide some reference for the further English listening teaching study.