从功能语篇角度分析提高高中英语听力能力的策略 On High School Listening Teaching Strategy from Functional Discourse Perspective

论文总字数：41312字

摘 要

英语听力是衡量学生语言能力和语言水平的重要标准，是一项非常重要的技能。语篇分析理论的衔接与连贯理论对英语听力教学的改进和学生英语听力的提高具有非常重要的指导意义。教师在听力教学过程中应利用语篇衔接和连贯的有关知识, 帮助学生掌握听力策略提高听力水平。本文研究了英语听力理解的特征，探讨了国内外对听力教学的研究和现状，发现了目前我国高中英语听力教学中存在的问题，以语篇衔接与连贯理论为基础，说明培养学生语篇衔接和连贯意识对提高听力能力的重要性。

关键词：高中英语听力教学；衔接；连贯

Contents

1. Introduction………………………………………………………………….1

2. Literature Review…………………………………………………………...3

2. 1Discourse cohesion and coherence………………………………………….3

2. 2 Features of listening comprehension……………………………………….4

2. 3 Researches on listening teaching…………………………………………...5

3. Current Situations of Listening Teaching in High School………………..7

3.1 Less emphasis on listening teaching………………………………………. .7

3.2 Absence of discourse theory in listening teaching……....………………….8

4. Application of Cohesion and Coherence Theory in High School English Listening Teaching……………………………………………………………..9

4.1 Use coherence theory to predict textual pattern…………………………….9

4.2 Use cohesion theory to form textual links…………………………………13

5．Conclusion…………………………………………………………………15

Works Cited…………………………………………………………………...17

1. Introduction

As one of the four basic language skills students are bound to master when learning a foreign language and an important means of communication in people’s daily life, listening comprehension skill has always been the focus of foreign language teaching. However, nowadays high school students are weak in listening. Their listening competence is lower than the competence of reading and writing. At present, there are still a lot of problems with high school English listening teaching. For example, students and teachers pay little attention to listening, so listening teaching is far from efficient.

Many experts and scholars home and abroad have achieved some success in listening teaching. O’Malley and Chamot pointed out that listening cognition strategy is prediction, reasoning, taking notes and the use of background knowledge. (O’Malley and Chamot 109)The aim is to meet the purpose of the training. However, their conclusions were not consistent. The studies on listening teaching still need improving. For students’ difficulty in listening comprehension, the writer of this thesis thinks one of the important reasons is the lack of adequate knowledge of discourse cohesion and coherence, thus put forward the research question of this paper: how to apply the knowledge of discourse cohesion and coherence theory to high school English listening teaching. This paper discusses the motif mainly from two aspects: cohesion theory and coherence theory.

Cohesion can be regarded as all the lexical and grammatical links that link one part of a text to another. This includes the use of lexical sets, synonyms, pronouns, verb tenses, grammatical references, time references, etc. Coherence can be regarded as how meanings and sequences of ideas relate to each other. It is hard to separate the two. But we can regard coherence as a text making sense as a whole at an idea level, and cohesion as more mechanical links at a language level.

In this paper, the author states discourse cohesion and coherence and the characteristics of the listening teaching, and talks about the discussions and researches of domestic and foreign scholars on discourse cohesion and coherence applied to listening teaching. Then, the writer of this thesis analyzes the present situations and the problems of the high school English listening teaching, and find that schools pay no enough attention to listening teaching, teachers overuse Chinese, and the teachers themselves lack discourse theory knowledge. To solve these problems, the writer of this thesis explains how to apply discourse cohesion and coherence theory to high school English listening teaching, which is the focus of this article.

This paper shows that if teachers enable students to have some cohesion knowledge, to be familiar with relevant chapters’ structures, to pay attention to the use of textual cohesion knowledge to understand the comprehensive semantics, and to grasp the key words in the process of listening teaching, to a great extent, students’ listening level will greatly improve. In terms of listeners, the discourse coherence refers to the pattern image of the speakers’ words or descriptions of things in listeners’ mind. In the process of listening, the listeners contact the words they hear with the corresponding semantic organization to build a mutually connected image with complete semantics in the listeners’ mind. Cohesion is generated on the basis of coherence and is one of the important means of establishment of coherent relationship. As far as the relationship between coherence and cohesion, coherence is primary and the precondition of the listeners’ understanding discourse, while cohesion is the relationship signal the speakers intentionally or unintentionally leave. To produce a coherent discourse, the speakers should take advantage of a series of regulation means and the listeners should use these means to help to forecast, judge and analyze the discourse, and then build schemata, so as to realize the understanding of the discourse coherence. Through continuous training students in high school gradually improve the comprehension of the listening materials. Finally, the writer of this thesis finds that the application of discourse cohesion and coherence theory to practical English listening teaching is greatly effective. Through the research on this subject, the purpose of this paper is to cultivate the students’ listening skills in understanding the overall text and improve students’ listening ability to meet the requirements of a new round of the curriculum reform and the college entrance examination.

2. Literature Review

Listening is a kind of language communication and a positive thinking activity, but is by no means negative recognition and acceptance of characters. Listeners’ understanding of the literal meaning of materials is the lowest level of understanding. But if listeners don’t have an ability to judge the logic relationship among all thoughts of the text, listeners will not be able to understand the speaker’s intentions and goals. If we figure out the inner link among thoughts, we can better understand the intention of the speakers, and come into the deep understanding of the material. Therefore, for the sake of success of listening comprehension, not only does it require the listeners to have a correct understanding of language knowledge such as grammar and vocabulary, but it is more important for listeners to have a logically reasoning and deducing ability.

2.1Discourse cohesion and coherence

Halliday put forward the concept of cohesion in 1962 for the first time. In Cohesion in English, Halliday and Hasan regard cohesion as meaning relations existing within the chapter and making it become discourse. (Halliday and Hasan 192) They believe the reason why cohesion can make words become discourse lies in the connection of sentences having no connection to each other in the structure through the means such as grammar and vocabulary, and so on. Coherence is one of the important characteristics of discourse. As one of the main means of achieving coherence, cohesion establishes semantic relations in discourse, whose purpose is to achieve coherence of the meaning of discourse. However, the use of cohesion is not the guarantee of discourse coherence. Cohesion is the visible network of discourse, which is embodied in the surface structure of discourse. That is, the dominant relations of components of discourse by the means of grammar, vocabulary and chapter. Coherence is the invisible network of discourse, which is embodied in the deep structure of discourse. That is, readers and listeners manifest the potential meaning and hidden relationships among components of discourse through interpretation. Cohesion is a hot topic in domestic and foreign language educational field in recent years. Cohesion is essentially a semantic concept, reflecting the semantic relations among the discourse language components. Coherence is a key concept of discourse analysis. Yule defined coherence as familiar and predictable relations in used experience when we connected the meaning of words, although these linguistic connections were not necessarily indicated. (Yule 76) Thus it can be seen that coherence is a character where words are significantly correlated in discourse. Halliday and Hasan ever stated that the discourse coherence is embodied in two aspects, coherence in the scene which embodies register consistency and coherence in textual ontology which is cohesive. This article focuses on the latter.

2. 2 Features of listening comprehension

Listening comprehension is a very complicated process, which involves language, cognition, culture, psychology, encyclopedic knowledge, and so on. Listening comprehension is the process of transforming sounds into information with the use of linguistic knowledge like voice, vocabulary and grammar and non-linguistic knowledge through the auditory organs and the brain’s cognitive activities. Many experts and scholars put forward different views on the nature of listening comprehension from different angles. G. Brown summarized the following five points with regard to the nature of listening comprehension. (G. Brown 223)

First, identify words and remember the meaning associated with the words. Second, understand how each word interacts with the context and create the context for the neighboring word’s meaning, and work out which words constitute the subject, which words constitute the predicate, and what the pronouns refer to. Third, understand the meaning of the each sentence in the local context as well as the meaning of the sentence in the whole discourse. Fourth, the understanding of discourse involves two aspects. One is to understand the discourse according to knowledge and background provided by the local context of discourse. Two is to infer the implied relationship of space, time, causality and intention in the discourse. Fifth, with regard to a long discourse, at least remember its general meaning. As for a short discourse, remember the important content as soon as possible, especially the content associated with the speaker’s current intentions.

Listening comprehension is a complex mental process of interaction between language and thinking, which involves a comprehensive language skill. The listeners complexly process the language signal and make it become the information matched with the speakers’ wishes, which is stored in short-term memory. In addition, listeners achieve the understanding of the material by judging, predicting, confirming and amending the content according to characters of the context, language knowledge and non-language knowledge with a number of micro skills such as semantic association, prediction, judgment.

From the perspective of the process of listening comprehension, different researchers have different opinions. But in summary, the process of listening comprehension has three characteristics. First, listening comprehension is an active process. In the process of listening comprehension, the listeners don’t receive information passively, but mobilize their own knowledge in the brain to make the active cognitive reasoning, and then understand the message and intentions conveyed by speakers. Therefore, listening comprehension is a process of communication in which listeners actively participate. Second, listening comprehension is a process of the listeners’ creating meaning. Discourse meaning is not readily available in the language materials. Different listeners may have different semantic understanding of the same information. In the process of language communication, speakers unnecessarily give expressions in any details according to the context. Therefore, in the process of listening comprehension, the listeners need to creatively construct the discourse meaning according to the clue of language materials and the schemata in our own experience. Third, listening comprehension is an interactive process. As an important aspect of language communication, listening comprehension involves speakers and listeners. In the process of communication, on the one hand, the speakers judge whether the listeners understand their discourse meaning by observing the listeners’ state of mood changes, and continuously adjust the words. On the other hand, the listeners often take verbal or nonverbal measures to show their understanding of discourse.

2. 3 Researches on listening teaching

With the development of science and technology, more and more researches at home and abroad focus on the importance of listening teaching. At the same time, they find that the application of discourse cohesion and coherence plays an important role in English listening teaching.

2.3.1 Foreign researches on listening teaching

Rost’s listening comprehension mode is based on the relevance theory, whose process is as follows: first, the listeners mobilize the words in the brain; then, the listeners selectively analyze and achieve the meaning of language through voice, syntax and vocabulary; next, the listeners provide a possible pragmatic meaning of the words; finally, the listeners line up the meaning and put them in long memory.(Rost 121) Rost thinks that these stages overlap and relate to each other, and that the ultimate goal is to look for relevant links and to achieve the pragmatic meaning of words. Context is composed of a series of pragmatic meaning. Listeners need to infer a complete context from these incomplete meanings. Therefore, if listeners succeed in predicting, thinking of and reasoning the discourse and context, they can understand inner links of words, produce better contextual effect, and really understand the speakers’ intention.

Anderson argued that listening is an active process including attention, understanding, memory and evaluation and a psychological process that the listeners make use of the knowledge in the brain and all kinds of strategies to understand the words they listen to. The classification of listening learning strategies is based on the classification of learning strategies which learners make use of to achieve effective learning. Therefore, listening learning strategies refer to a series of measures and actions taken by the learners in order to achieve effective listening learning. (Anderson 323)

2.3.2Domestic researches on listening teaching

The domestic studies of listening teaching began in the 1990’s. Late as they started, the involvement in listening studies was wide. People gradually began to attach importance to researches on listening teaching from the perspective of students as the main body in listening. Zhang Jianzhong and Yu Gongzhen argue that listening comprehension is the process of reorganizing the auditory information and then creatively understanding the intentions of the speakers on the basis of the listeners’ proactive thinking. (Zhang and Yu 212) So in the process of listening comprehension, not only do the listeners need to correctly perceive and distinguish the sound symbols, but listeners mobilize the background knowledge in the brain and at the same time take advantages of a series of cognitive strategies to process, analyze and reconstruct the information so as to understand what meaning the sound symbols represent. Therefore, this process is an actively and positively psychological language activity process mixing physiological, linguistic and psychological factors. Zuo HuanQi argues that listening comprehension refers to the process where listeners associate information heard according to the listening materials with the existing social, cultural and linguistic knowledge in the brain, and then adopt a series of strategies to understand the meaning of the listening materials.(Zuo 99) Therefore, listening comprehension is the process of the human brain’s consciously and actively processing language. Su Yuanlian did the relevant learning strategy questionnaire which was theoretically based on the process pattern of conveying listening comprehension and learning strategy training mode and pointed out that listening strategy training helps improve students’ confidence in learning, consciousness of strategy use and English listening level. (Su 152)

3. Current Situations of Listening Teaching in High School

In our current system of teaching, listening teaching is a weak link, and there are many shortcomings to be improved. In the listening teaching, although new vocabulary is not much, a lot of students are still at a loss, whose understanding of listening materials is extremely insufficient. In the class learning survey, the writer of this thesis analyzes two aspects, the present situation in high school English listening teaching high school and requirements of English new curriculum standard for the listening ability of students.

3.1 Less emphasis on listening teaching

Teachers are lack of correct understanding of the importance of listening comprehension and listening teaching. Listening comprehension is the process where students actively capture, comb, memorize, discriminate, process, settle, store, infer, understand, and reproduce the information. Listening comprehension is a complex process of active and positive psychological language activities mixing physiological, linguistic and psychological factors. But the teachers simplify the listening process, thinking that students can improve their listening skills as long as they listen more. So they also simplify listening teaching activities and use the training methods where students listen to the tape, do exercises and check the answers. In fact, the simple teaching form deprives students of the main body status in listening activities, which leads to the low enthusiasm of students to participate in the listening activities.

Listening, speaking, reading and writing are four aspects of language skills that high school students must grasp. They promote each other during language learning and communication. According to the researches, listening is an important way to access to information. So, students should do the listening practice as preparation for exams. The teachers should guide students to believe that the listening activities are valid ways to master the language knowledge, improve language skills, and promote comprehensive linguistic language ability. Because as an important way of language input, listening activities can not only effectively guide students to distinguish the information of English language voice symbols, but they can make students positively think, restructure and creatively understand language information, learn language knowledge, and then construct new knowledge in order to improve the ability of pragmatic language. Especially for teachers, only when they truly realize the importance of listening activity, they can correctly guide students in listening activities and improve the students’ ability of comprehensive pragmatic language. In addition, the present situation of high school English teachers is generally terrible. Teachers have heavy teaching tasks. Every day, they need to join morning independent study, and do intelligence researches twice a week to sort out the high quality of programs. They also make appropriate adjustment based on their class. After class, the teachers take back and correct programs. According to the situation of students’ completion and the teaching goal of teaching content, teachers prepare the next class. The working situation overloads teachers, and there is few time and energy on the study of the teaching theory. The current education system is lack of professional necessary periodic refresher courses. Teachers can’t know the latest teaching theory, let alone apply the theory to the listening teaching practice. In fact, young teachers are very eager to have an opportunity to continue to learn knowledge closely related to education teaching.

3.2 Absence of discourse theory in listening teaching

A variety of phenomena show that teachers themselves lack discourse theory. The author thinks that it is normal universities’ responsibility. The normal universities do not design the discourse courses. For this problem, the writer of this thesis did a survey among her classmates. The writer of this thesis asked them whether they know discourse theory or not, and if they do know it, how well they understand it. The result is as expected. 90 percentages of them do not know discourse theory at all, and only 10 percentages of them know a little about it.

Teachers interpret the isolated meaning of words in the class and ignore the context of words. Words matching with different words in the different contexts show different meanings. It is the English and Chinese vocabulary contrast teaching of high school teachers imprisons the students’ thinking and leads to a phenomenon where the students know the form but don’t understand the meaning. What’s more, teaching is partial to memory. Most English teachers grow up in the learning environment of the machinery memory. Their own way to learn is to memorize, and they have obtained the certain effect. So they require their students to mechanically repeatedly memorize in their learning. There is no plan of word review after learning.

4. Application of Cohesion and Coherence Theory in High School English Listening Teaching

When an English-speaking person hears English, he can easily determine that this is a complete piece of words or combination of completely unrelated sentences. This means that there are inevitably some features in the discourse, and these features are what the combination of unrelated sentences lacks. Discourse is a semantic unit. Discourse is not made of sentences, but information in the discourse is decoded by sentences. Therefore, that a set of sentences can become a discourse depends on cohesive ties among different sentences. Cohesion is one of the means to achieve discourse coherence. Discourse is coherent in cohesion and register. Discourse is consistent with the context, and thus is consistent with register. Discourse itself is coherent, so it is cohesive.(Hu 113)

4.1 Use coherence theory to predict textual pattern

Logical connections will help the listeners to predict subsequent sentence’s meaning. The connection in discourse refers to the relationship between the adjacent sentences or groups. Hu Zhuanglin divided it into addition, transition, causal and space according to the semantic distinction category. Addition refers to the phenomenon that speakers add some new conditions after speaking a sentence. Space connection mainly expresses time and space relations.

4.1.1 Coherence in the conversation

The cooperative principle is a theory to explain conversational meaning in pragmatics. As we all know, there is a major premise in the conversation that participants have the wish to continue the conversation. That is to say, the participants must hold the attitude of cooperation. The cooperative principle can be embodied as four criterions, the maxim of quantity, the maxim of quality, the maxim of relevance and the maxim of manner. For the maxim of quantity, what speakers say should include the necessary information and avoid too much unnecessary information. For the maxim of quality, what speakers say should not be false. For the maxim of relevance, what speakers say should relate to the topic. For the maxim of manner, speakers should clearly express their words and avoid obscure and ambiguity. In real practice, turns of some conversations are obviously related or coherent with each other and listeners can easily be informed about what the speakers are talking about. In some conversations, however, on the surface they sound or seem incoherent but are actually a coherent discourse. Speakers don’t use apparent cohesive devices or leave the obvious stitching, but depend on meaning or content cohesion to make the conversation coherent according to knowledge and ability of the both sides in the communication. On the other hand, listeners need to rely on either certain shared knowledge relevant to the topic or background cultural knowledge to understand the conversation with these stylistic colors or infer the true meaning of the utterance. The following is an example.

W: How did Rosa do on her English exam?

M: She passed with f lying colors.

Flying colors means giddy and triumphant. Colors refer the flag of the naval warships or army troops. They win in a battle, the military flag fluttering. If speakers know the cultural background, they will easily understand the conversation. If they don’t understand the meaning of flying colors, they cannot understand the meaning of the conversation. So, students should read more books about cultures to enrich their knowledge and make use of the knowledge to improve English listening.

4.1.2 Coherence in different genres

Chapters’ structures can influence semantic coherence between sentences and sentences, or even of the whole article. If chapters’ structure violates the logical order, it will make semantics incoherent again. Different styles have different macro structures characteristics and writing.

In particular, historical events and the narration of story cover time, places, characters and scenes. They generally use the past tense, and narrate in the chronological order. Listeners should capture and record the information which can answer problems related to who, what, when, where, and how, so as to grasp the development of the story and understand the full text. Biography belongs to the narration, which commonly narrates the true stories. It mainly narrates the lives or career success of some outstanding people in Chinese and foreign history, and also introduces special experience and performance of common characters. Students should pay special attention to time location, the main performance and the social evaluation of characters. These are generally obvious information. If we can often read these types of articles, and be familiar with the chapters’ structure, it is of great help to build up your language sense, and improve your listening.

Narration usually follows the time order. Listeners manage to understand the chapter according to clues of time, characters and the development of events. The following is an example.

My friend, Vernon Davies kept birds. One day he phoned and told me he was going away for a week. He asked me to feed the birds for him and said that he would leave the key to his front door in my mailbox. Unfortunately, I forgot all about the birds until the night before Vernon was going to return ...I soon found the key Vernon gave me ...but could not unlock...I was going to give up w hen I noticed that one bedroom window w as slightly open ...I was getting desperate .But in the end I managed to climb up and open the window.

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