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1.2 Research questions
The research questions are as follows:
Can students in senior high school identify illocutionary forces in listening comprehension?
Can the application of indirect speech acts theory give a great influence on English listening teaching?
Can the application of indirect speech acts theory improve students' listening comprehension ability?
2. Literature review
2.1 Literature review of listening comprehension
2.1.1 Definition of listening comprehension
Listening comprehension is an active process in which the listener constructs meaning by using cues from contextual information and existing knowledge while relying upon multiple strategic resources to fulfill the task requirement (O’Malley and Chamot, 1989:418-437).
Listening comprehension is a process whereby students actively construct a mental representation of an aural text based on prior knowledge of the topic and information found within (Fischer and Farris, 1995:29-90 ).
Listening comprehension is anything but a passive activity. It is a complex and active process in which the listeners must make distinctions between sounds, understand vocabularies and grammatical structure, and pay attention to stress and intonation. Apart from all of the above basic information, it also needs to interpret immediately with the context of the utterance. (Vandergrift, 1999:168-175).
All these different definitions demonstrate that listening comprehension is an active process which demands listener’s full engagement. In the process of listening comprehension, the listeners not only have to understand the literal meaning but also the intended meaning of the aural information, so as to infer what the speakers really mean.
2.1.2 Nature of listening comprehension
People’s views towards nature of listening comprehension have changed greatly from past to present. Brown and Yule (1983) believe that listening comprehension is not only about to understand the meaning of words and sentences, but also contains what speaker really means. And Little (1991) puts forward that the nature of listening comprehension is that listener should listen in a active way, apply his linguistic knowledge and non-linguistic knowledge as well. The current views of the nature of listening comprehension mainly focus on related research in semantics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics,cognitive science and discourse analysis. At present, researchers view listening comprehension as an active decoding and dynamic process but not passive perception.
2.1.3 Process of listening comprehension
According to the theory of Clark & Clark (1977), listening comprehension could be pided into two connected process: construction process and utilization process. In construction process, the key point of listening is distinguishing the components of sentences, and constructing meaning proposition. And utilization process is the second stage in which the listeners distinguish the speech act, proposition and subject content, and then search for consistent information in memory to understand the concrete meaning. Listening as an inner psychological process is difficult to study. The focus of researchers now lies in the interactive model of bottom-up and top-down processing, which mainly about whether the listeners firstly comprehend meaning by using of their world knowledge, context or communicative knowledge, and then understand the language form rely on vocabulary, syntax and grammar. Or the other way around, first bottom-up, and then top-down. Rost (1990) points out that the application of linguistic knowledge in comprehension is usually termed bottom-up processing, whereby the sounds, words, clauses and sentences of a passage are decoded in a linear mode to elicit meaning. Nunan (1991:18) defines the top-down processing of listening as “the use of inside the head knowledge, that is, knowledge which is not directly encoded in words.” And he holds the opinion that successful listening involves the integration of information and encoding in the message itself with broader knowledge of the world. In other words, effective listeners use both bottom-up and top-down strategies to construct message (1991:25). According to Celce-Murcia (1999:363-377), “both top-down and bottom-up listening skills should be integrated and explicitly treated pedagogically to improve second language listening comprehension. The discourse level is in fact where top-down and bottom-up listening intersected and where complex and simultaneous processing of background information, contextual information, and linguistic information permit comprehension and interpretation to take place”.