A Study On The Applications Of Relevance Theory In The Teaching Of College English Reading

Reading comprehension is not only important among the basic foreign language acquisition skills,but also regarded as a primary skill to acquire in the field of foreign language teaching. In the past a few decades,research on reading comprehension has grown remarkably and these different perspectives(bottom-up,top-down,interactive model and schema-theoretic model) have led to our overall understanding the reading process,However,these researches have certain weaknesses,and none of them can well integrate all the aspects possibly involved in the reading process.Nevertheless,no matter from what perspective,there is always a consensus idea that reading is in general terms an important mode of human communication.D.Sperber and D.Wilson have proposed the relevance theory,which provides a new approach to human communication from the cognitive perspective.Relevance theory is dedicated to the studies of the ostensive-inferential communication.As is mentioned,reading is a way of communication. Therefore,the relevance theory can also apply to accounting for the reading process.Although a considerable number of language scholars have done the research of the RT in various areas,such as translation,grammar,and discourse analysis,few of them have done the research of the RT in the field of reading teaching.As for the related research,they mainly focus on one or two aspects,which results in their incomprehensive and unsystematic exploration.The significance of this thesis is that it not only explores an effective attempt to expound the reading comprehension reading model in the RT framework but also illustrates in detail how this approach can be applied more systematically and comprehensively to the entire process of reading teaching.Furthermore,since the relevance theory reflects the process of communication more truly,comprehensively and systematically,the relevance-theoretic approach to reading comprehension based on it can better integrate all the aspects possibly involved in the reading process than other mentioned approaches.Therefore,it demonstrates more valuable implications for teaching reading.In order to test the significance of the application of Relevance Theory to reading comprehension,a comparative experiment is conducted between one class with traditional teaching method and the other one with input of Relevance Theory.The subjects of the experiment are from Harbin High Financial College.Through the pre-test,the post-test and questionnaire,the thesis comes to the conclusion that relevance-theoretical reading model is effective in teaching of English reading.Based on the results of the experiment and the current situations on college English reading, some pedagogical implications are presented.Finally,some merits and shortcomings of Relevance Theory are also discussed.This thesis consists of seven parts.The first part is the introduction.It mainly deals with the background,the purpose of the study and the organization of the paper.The second part is a literature review of studying on utterance understanding.It gives a short survey of Saussure Semeiotics,Grice's Conversational Implicature,Austin and Searle's Speech Acts and Sperber and Wilson's RT.The third part is the theoretical foundation of this thesis -RT.It gives a detailed introduction of RT and its advantages.The fourth part is the applications of Relevance Theory in English reading.First,it gives a survey of different reading models(including bottom-up model,top-down model,interactive model and schema-theoretic model).Then it analyzes the nature of reading comprehension based on Relevance Theory,At last it illustrates the roles of Relevance Theory in English reading.The fifth part makes an experiment,based on Relevance Theory.The subjects are 99 non-English majors in Harbin Financial College.The methods of the experiment are questionnaires and tests.According to the results,the experiment proves that the assumption of applying the Relevance Theory to English reading teaching is feasible.The sixth part offers some applicable pedagogical implications for teaching English reading in classroom.Firstly current situations in English reading class are pointed out and then some suggestions are given for English learning at different reading stages and finally some strategies are provided for teaching college English reading.The last part is the conclusion.Based on Relevance Theory,the thesis uses the experiment to prove the instructive role of Relevance Theory to English reading.It's an effective teaching method to improve the competence of students' reading comprehension.