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) 来*自~优|尔^论:文+网www.youerw.com +QQ752018766*
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。