Relevance Theory And Reading Comprehension

Since RT proposed by Sperber and Wilson in1986 came into existence, people have begun to make every attempt to use this theory to explain a variety of phenomena and solve all sorts of problems existing in our social life. Linguists and scholars also employ it to explain all kinds of linguistic phenomena such as: advertisement,pun,humor,satire and so on. Few people focus on the instruction of RT on the reading comprehension.In English teaching activity, reading comprehension occupies a very important opposition. In the present junior,senior,even college English CET4 and CET6 examinations, reading comprehension is designed to occupy a high percent, almost becomes a key factor which decides the success or failure of the examination. How to succeed in these examinations has been what the students show their great concern for. This paper proposes a new point of view and opens a new horizon from the angle of RT, and puts this kind of practice activity under the guidance of the theory.In Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Sperber and Wilson put forward that human communication is an ostension-inference process. In this paper, the author maintains that reading comprehension is also a kind of communicative activity of ostension-inference. The concept"mutual manifest ness"is employed to explain this process. The author places an emphasis on the importance of the context in helping students improve their English level and their reading speed and the ability of guessing new word. In the end, the author introduces some of her research results in the aspect of word memorization method as a solution to solve the current problems in reading comprehension.