A Relevance-theoretic Study Of Listening Comprehension And Its Teaching Implications

Listening comprehension plays a key role in verbal communication which determines that it becomes the research object of many disciplines. Plenty of studies have been conducted to examine the nature and mechanism of listening from the neurological perspective, psychological perspective, pragmatic perspective and SLA perspective. These studies have provided abundant implications for the teaching of EFL listening, but the influence seems to have exhausted its power because of the limitations of the studies.Relevance Theory creates a new perspective for listening comprehension research. Relevance Theory is first fully proposed by Sperber & Wilson in their work Relevance: Communication and Cognition, which was published in 1986. Relevance theory is a successful approach to communication and utterance interpretation from the cognitive and pragmatic perspective. The thesis will make an introduction of the key notions of relevance theory namely relevance, optimal relevance, contextual assumption, mutual manifestness, ostensive-inferential communication and deduction. The relevance-theoretic interpreting process of utterance is also touched upon in the thesis.Success of relevance theory in approaching communication and utterance interpretation displays its explanatory power of listening comprehension. Listening comprehension is an important aspect of communication and utterance interpretation. The thesis aims to account for listening comprehension within the framework of relevance-theoretic account of communication and utterance interpretation. According to relevance theory, human communication is governed by a general principle—the principle of relevance, which is defined as: (1) Human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance; (2) every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance (Sperber & Wilson, 1995). According to this principle, optimal relevance is the intrinsic property of all listening materials. Listening comprehension should be optimal relevance oriented. However, during the process of looking for optimal relevance, it is human cognition geared to the maximization of relevance that plays the key role, and this makes it possible to achieve as much contextual effect as possible. Relevance theory views context as dynamic rather than static. During the process of communication, context is constantly changing due to the interaction between old information and new information. Context in relevance theory is presented as contextual assumptions. In listening comprehension, dynamic of context is embodied in two aspects. First, in the micro-inferential process of interpretation of a certain utterance, the elimination and construction of assumptions result in the updating of context; second, in the macro-process of a communication case, newly-heard utterances require the hearer to make new contextual assumptions. Mutual manifestness is another important concept in relevance theory. It includes mutual manifestness of cognitive environment, mutual manifestness of intention and mutual manifestness of context. Mutual manifestness of cognitive environment imposes certain requirements on listening materials and this is the premise of successful listening comprehension. Mutual manifestness of intention is the aim of listening comprehension. Mutual manifestness of context is an indispensable condition in listening comprehension process. Relevance theory views communication as an ostensive-inferential process. The speaker produces an ostensive stimulus of its optimal relevance in the form of an utterance while the hearer interprets the utterance through pragmatic inference. Receiving the stimulus, the hearer immediately activates relevant contextual information and makes a set of assumptions. Assumptions are constantly eliminated and constructed through deduction until enough contextual effect is produced to make the communicative intention mutually manifest. The thesis also examines explicature and implicature in listening comprehension based on the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure. With the relevance-theoretic account of listening comprehension carefully conducted, a relevance-theoretic model of listening comprehension will be proposed in the thesis.After the theoretical analysis of listening comprehension, the thesis proposes a few suggestions on the teaching of EFL listening. It is suggested that teachers should strengthen the teaching of background knowledge, emphasize the cultivation of deductive ability, pay attention to the building of an appropriate environment of listening and make good use of students' learning autonomy. The author also carried out an experiment which indicates that the suggestions are feasible to a certain extent.