A Relevance-Theoretic Perspective To Reading Comprehension

The teaching of reading is supposed to be one of the most important courses in EFL class in China. As the most effective and most important channel of linguistic input, reading comprehension is a kind of language communicative activity. The process of Reading Comprehension is a cognitive psychological process of inference for the implied deeper intention from the surface information of language. However, the traditional approach of English reading teaching is based on theory of code model. Under this circumstance, such teaching methodology possesses some demerits that inhabit the development of the students'reading proficiency and reading skills rather than promote them. It views the EFL reading as an encoding and decoding process, in which new words, phrases and even sentence patterns are taken as discrete language points and elaborated upon by the teacher, but the gist of the text is usually overlooked. In the past few decades, along with the development of research on reading comprehension, more and more scholars and teachers have come to recognize the process and nature of reading comprehension.In 1986, French scholar Sperber and English professor Wilson put foreword Relevance Theory in their work: Relevance: Communication and Cognition. In comparison with the traditional code model, it reflects the process of communication more truly and comprehensively. It regards the process of communication as an ostensive-inferential one, in which the communicator is involved in ostension while the audience in inference. According to the Relevance Theory, human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance and every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance. What to communicate for understanding is the communicator's intention, which falls into informative intention and communicative intention. Only on the condition that communicative intention is fulfilled can successful communication be achieved. To grasp the communicative intention, the audience needs to do inference, construct certain context according to the principle of relevance and realize the ultimate goal of achieving the optimal relevance. As is mentioned, reading is a way of communication. Therefore, Relevance Theory can also apply to accounting for the reading process. Based on this, we propose a new approach to reading, that is, the relevance-theoretic approach. Following the detailed interpretation of the reading process under the framework of the relevance-theoretic approach, we mainly focus on the applications of this approach to reading teaching. In addition, the significant implications of this approach are also discussed through contrasting it with other approaches mentioned in this thesis.The thesis is an attempt to explore the nature of reading comprehension under the relevance-theoretic framework. As far as the structure is concerned the paper falls into five chapters in all.The first chapter is the introduction, which gives the main idea of the thesis. Chapter Two gives an overview of reading comprehension: the definition of reading, four major models of reading comprehension and the nature of reading are involved respectively. Chapter Three outlines the framework of relevance theory among which the main ideas of relevance theory are presented and brings up a relevance-theoretic account of the comprehension The following issues are focused: (1) ostensive-inferential communication in reading comprehension; (2) reading as a process of choosing context; (3) reading comprehension as a process of seeking optimal relevance between the writer and the reader.Chapter Four gives some implications of Relevance Theory for teaching college reading: first, the application of Relevance Theory for lexical meaning in context; second, the application of Relevance Theory for rhetoric language; last, filling in the cross-cultural information gap.Chapter Five is the last chapter which summaries the whole thesis and comes to a conclusion. In this part, the development of the thesis is outlined. It reiterates that the relevance-theoretic approach to reading not only provides an adequate and comprehensive interpretation of reading comprehension, but also supplies specific directions to the improvement of how to teach college reading well. In addition, the great implications of this approach are highlighted once more. All these demonstrate the great vitality and continuous development of the Relevance Theory. It is hoped that more efforts and attempts will be made in this direction.