安徽财经大学外国语学院英语系毕业论文
Chapter 2 Listening Comprehension in TEM4 and Speech
Act Theory
This chapter may well elaborate the current situations of English listening comprehension together with variety of problems students are facing up with at present, and accordingly it provides readers with some solutions. It shows that some rules and regulations are crucial to the improvement of learners’ language listening competence, and here speech act theory is the very one of them. Then it comes to an introduction of the basic theory of speech acts, and both Austin’s model of speech acts and Searle’s classification of speech acts are included.
2.1 Current Situations and Significance of English Listening
In the past, language teaching had placed great emphasis on the importance of language knowledge, including vocabulary, grammar and the written form. These days, however, language teaching has come to a new stage which is to enhance students’
language
ability
and
communicative
ability
simultaneously.
Correspondingly, large quantities of studies have highlighted the great importance of listening in language acquisition, and listening comprehension skills have started to receive much more attention in language teaching than it has ever been. In the study of second language acquisition, for instance, listening has been considered as paramount to the development of a learner’s second language acquisition. In recent years, teachers and scholars have increasingly recognized the importance of teaching listening comprehending in classrooms and begun to understand the role it plays in language learning and language communication.
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安徽财经大学外国语学院英语系毕业论文
Listening comprehension plays a very important role in the second language acquisition, and it should be the gateway to the obtainment of all the other aspects of language learning. Its importance is mainly due to the following three reasons. To crown all, listening comprehension provides learners with the comprehensible input which is essential for any learning to occur. Another reason for this is that listeners need to interact with speakers to achieve a sort of comprehensive understanding. Last but not least, listening has often been regarded as an integrative skill for the reason that it can facilitate the emergency of other language skills, and learners should be aware of the notion that listening is a fundamental skill for students to develop other language skills and further improve their second language competence. The listening comprehension, therefore, should be ranked among one of the most important sections in language learning.
Listening is one of the fundamental language skills. It is the medium through which listeners can gain a large portion of their education, their information and their understanding of the world, and of human beings values, appreciation and their outlook of the whole world. In these days of mass communication, it is of pivotal significance for students, especially for the English majors, to be taught to listen effectively and precisely.
Though listening plays such an important role, still it has many problems. For example, the listening comprehension cannot get sufficient attention, and the listening materials students can get access to are far from satisfactory. According to a survey, there are two kinds of listening materials prevailing in the current listening course, one is Step by Step compiled by East China Normal University, and the other is Listen to This Series by Beijing International Studies University. However, these listening materials have nearly unchanged for ages of years, and most of the messages have already been out of date, which make the students take no interest in
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安徽财经大学外国语学院英语系毕业论文
them at all. Worse still, many students find that they are facing up with the predicament that many years of hard study has never gotten somewhere in their listening comprehension competence, which makes them end up anxious, frustrated, depressed, and hopeless.
2.2 Listening Comprehension in TEM4 as a Demanding Skill
TEM4, as a vital marker in English learning, is of great significance to English majors. It should, therefore, test the true ability of the students from all aspects, including reading, writing, translation, and listening. In recent years, the listening part has been increased further and further, so much so that it has accounted for precisely thirty percent of the whole examination, of which fifteen percent is the listening comprehension part. There are altogether three sections in this part, section A is the conversations, section B passages and section C news broadcast. Section A includes several conversations, most of which involve the daily communication of the native speakers of English, and different sorts of accents are needed to distinguish. Section B is the passage part, every passage contains about two hundred words. It is not so difficult, but listeners are required to apprehend the speakers’ attitudes, emotions and especially their true intentions. And this is the most important part the paper intends to discuss. For the news broadcast, it is mainly about the programs and daily news abstracted from the BBC or VOA. Given the importance of listening both in daily communication and in English test, it is essential for students to have the idea of “listening first”, and make good use of the speech act theory they have learned in their linguistic class to strengthen their listening competence.
Listening comprehension, as one of the separate and indispensable section of language listening, has come to attract people’s attention much more than ever
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安徽财经大学外国语学院英语系毕业论文
before. Yet, the seemingly simple question of what listening comprehension really is is difficult to answer. Even linguists do not agree among themselves as to what listening comprehension is. Listening comprehension has once been characterized as a “passive” or “receptive” skill. It seems as if language learners just passively absorb the listening materials offered by textbooks or tapes. But it is not always the case. Listening comprehension, as a matter of fact, is more than hearing, and it’s a complex mixture and involves various aspects and factors, in which the listener is an active participant, rather than a passive one. In order to comprehend the conversation, the listener has to reconstruct the original intention of the speaker by making use of the speech act theory and by drawing on what he or she has already known to make use of his or her experiences and knowledge.
Since 1980, listening comprehension has been considered as a primary vehicle for language learning. It is the primary bridge from which listener can get access to the second language data and in which we process language in real time-employing pacing. Thus it may well serve as the analyst for language acquisition. However, it is meanwhile a very demanding skill, and its harshness is due to the anxiety provoked by social and psychological factors. When a listener encounters a foreign language, he or she may subconsciously realize the impossibility of full comprehension of the messages given by the speaker. It is an internal process that could not be directly observed, because nobody knows what indeed will happen in the next moment when he or she listens to and apprehends one sentence after another. Listening is such a skill that seems to develop easily for the mother- tongue listening, but it’s not the case for the foreign language one. From all the aspects, the author comes to the conclusion that listening comprehension is a demanding skill.
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安徽财经大学外国语学院英语系毕业论文
2.3 Introduction to the Basic Theory of Speech Acts
In English, we may often hear people say “Actions speak louder than words” and “Easier said than done”. However, there seems to be no clear-cut boundary between speaking and acting. Rather, saying is often acting. And some utterances are constatives, i. e. descriptions of facts or states of affairs, whereas some others are performatives, i. e. the saying itself accomplishing a certain action, which is usually characterized by the use of first person subject, simple present tense, indicative mood and active voice. To portray the actions performed via utterances, we use the term “speech acts”, which are considered to be the basic or minimal units of linguistic communication.
According to Austin, when we speak, we not only produce some units of language with certain meanings, but also make clear our purpose in producing them, the way we intend them to be understood, or they also have certain forces. Speech act itself can be performing three component acts at the same time: locutionary act (the act of verbally saying something), illocutionary act (the intended act behind saying something), and perlocutionary act (the intended effect of an illocutionary act). For instances, when Jane says to John, “My bag is heavy”. The locutionary act Jane performed is the uttering of the English sentences with the help of lexicon, grammar and syntax; the illocutionary act Jane performed reveals the real purpose of the speaker, and it can be an implicit request for John to carry the bag for her; and the perlocutionary act performed via the uttering of the sentence is the effect or outcome brought about, i. e. John goes to help her carry the bag. Defined in this way, the locutionary act is what linguists have been studying all along. That is, how sounds, words and sentences are made, and what inherent meanings they have. The perlocutionary act involves many psychological and social factors, of which we are
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