There is a common problem for both the students of English major and the ones of non English major in the teaching of listening comprehension. That is: their listening comprehension for simple sentences and short dialogues is quite good, while their listening comprehension for longer discourses is relatively poor. Their problem in listening comprehension lies mainly in literal understanding of language, vocabulary and sentence structures. This is because they try to catch each separate sentence while listening and seldom regard the discourse as a whole. The purpose of discourse analysis is to ...
