A Study On Relevance-Theory Based Listening Teaching Model

English listening is always the weak link for Chinese English learners, and it is lack of theoretical guidance, so the level of listening has always been at the bottom. Scholars have studied listening comprehension from behaviorism, psychology, schema theory, SLA and other perspectives. And the results have a profound effect. Because of the defects of these theories, the development of listening teaching is slow. Thus the author introduces Relevance Theory to compensate the deficiency of prior researches. A new listening teaching model based on Relevance Theory is put forward. And the validity of this model is tested through comparative method.Firstly, the author introduces the relative concepts of Relevance Theory. Based on these concepts, the author explains the process of listening comprehension from the perspective of Relevance Theory and points out that listening comprehension, in fact, is a process that the listener finds the optimal relevance in the mutual cognitive environment. Relevance Theory treats listening comprehension as an ostensive-inferential process: the speaker sends his ostensive stimulus out to the target listener, while the listener decodes the speaker s ostensive stimulus and infers the speaker s communicative intention; the mutual manifestness of communicative intention symbolizes the success of listening comprehension. The context in Relevance Theory, being different from the contexts in other theories, is a dynamic concept. The dynamic context makes the listening comprehension a dynamic process.After the deep understanding of the relationship between Relevance Theory and listening comprehension, the author establishes the Relevance Theory based listening teaching model. In this model, listening teaching is not just a simple process of playing listening materials and checking answers, but a process of background knowledge acquisition, students inferential ability improvement, and students listening interest stimulation. This model can be put into practice in three phrases which have different points of emphasis. In the pre-listening phrase, the background knowledge related with the listening materials is introduced to students in order to improve their inferential ability. In the listening phrase, it is important to create a relaxed environment and to encourage students to guess and predict the communicative intention. And the work in the post-listening phrase is to guide students to grasp the listening material on the whole, and to give more relative exercises. Finally, based on the traditional listening teaching model and relevance-theory based model, the author chooses 92 freshmen of non-English major from Dezhou University to do a comparative study. This experiment lasts for one semester. Two tests and one questionnaire are used to collect data. The collected data are analyzed by SPSS. The results show that the listening teaching model under the guidance of Relevance Theory is effective and is welcomed by students.