Chapter OneLITERATURE REVIEW
Context cognitive, a concept of the utmost importance in pragmatics, is differentfrom traditional context on the aspect of its cognition. Early linguists usually regardcontext as a static concept and research it from the perspective of its definition,function and constituent elements. In the late 20th century, the birth of cognitivecontext provides a new field for interpreting dynamic communication. As a complexpsychological process to construct meaning, listening is appropriate to be interpretedin the guidance of cognitive context. This chapter gives a clear introduction aboutcognitive context and listening comprehension relatively.
1.1Cognitive Context
The publication of Relevance: Communication and Cognition is a turning pointfor context research. This book aims to lay a solid foundation of cognitive science andassumes that communication is a cognitive process. Compared with traditionalcontext, the cognitive context is suitable to be the assistance to interpret humancommunication which is dynamic. In this chapter, the development, as well ascharacteristics of context will be explained in detail.Context has drawn scholars’ attention since a long time. Initially, scholars’researches on context is only restricted in text. Linguists gradually find that there stillexists non-linguistic context. In 1923, British anthropologist Malinowski finds thatthe explanation of context which is restricted in text is limited. He puts forward theterm “context of situation” firstly in his article The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Language. He defines context as that “exactly as in the reality of spoken or writtenlanguages, a word without linguistic context is a stands for nothing by itself, so in thereality of a spoken living tongue, the utterance has no meaning except in the contextof situation” (1923:307). He also remarks that without context, the language itself ismeaningless.Malinowski’s views are brought in the field of linguistics by his students, thefamous British linguist, Firth, who defines context as “a set of abstract conceptsrelates to each other in terms of semantic” (Qiou, 1999:4). He emphasizes thatmeaning is essential to context and discourse is a kind of group behavior participatedby two or more people who share common situational context and experiential contextin communication. Firth extends the scope of context to experiential context. For along period, the ideas of London School affect a large number of linguistics. LikeHalliday, he also believes that meaning is context-dependent.
..........
1.2 English Listening Comprehension
Listening comprehension takes a significant position in language study. Due toits importance, scholars from various fields do research on it.As a kind of language skill, listening is used frequently to absorb new ideas andinformation (Chen, 2017).Wilga M. R (1978), an expert from UK, clearly points outin his book, A Practical Guide to the Teaching of English as a Second or ForeignLanguage, in the general communication of adults, listening accounts for 45% of the whole verbal communication while speaking, reading and writing account for 30%,16% and 9% separately. Hence we can see that listening comprehension plays a keyrole in the process of language input and oral English study. Rost (1990) outlines theimportance of listening in foreign language study as follows: firstly, listening providesinformation input for lear，英语毕业论文，英语论文范文 |
