A Study On Pragmatic Inference Ability Of First Year Non-English Major Students In English Reading Comprehension

Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory believes that verbal communication is an ostensive-inferential process.From the perspective of the speaker,communication is a process of ostension;while from the perspective of hearers,it is a process of inference.Similarly the process of reading comprehension is another kind of communication,namely written communication,between the writer and readers.From the perspective of the writer,reading comprehension is an ostensive process;however,from the perspective of readers,it is an inferential process.The writer usually omits his explanations and information that he assumes his readers have already known,thus readers should use their encyclopedic,logical and lexical knowledge to infer the author’s intention through the literal meaning of the reading materials.Therefore,reading comprehension is also an ostensive-inferential process.Under the framework of Relevance Theory,the process of reading comprehension is also a process of seeking the optimal relevance and a process of choosing context apart from an ostensive-inferential process.The nature of reading comprehension is inference.Readers make inference to comprehend the ostensive intension conveyed by the author in the reading passage.Therefore the inference ability will influence readers’ understanding of the passage.In this research,inference ability,also called pragmatic inference ability,refers to students’ ability to make predictions or interpretations according to the facts or information available to them by means of some strategies and their logical knowledge,encyclopedic knowledge and lexical knowledge.In order to find first year non-English major students’ current level of pragmatic inference ability in English reading comprehension,whether their performance is different in different kinds of inference items and the reasons accounting for this phenomenon,the author designed the following research questions: 1)What’s the current condition of first year non-English major students’ pragmatic inference ability in English reading comprehension? 2)Is students’ pragmatic inference ability different in different kinds of inference items,namely detail inference items,word-meaning inference items,attitude inference items and thematic inference items?3)What are the causes of this phenomenon? In order to find the answers to these questions,a total of 205 subjects have been chosen as the sample for this study.The author designed reading comprehension test and one questionnaire.All the data of both test and questionnaire are analyzed by SPSS Statistics Package 20.0.The major findings are as follows: 1)Students’ pragmatic inference ability is at the “not high” level,which needs to be improved.2)Students’ pragmatic inference ability is different in different inference items.It is best in detail inference items and poorest in thematic inference items.Students’ inference ability in word-meaning inference items is a little better than that in attitude inference items.3)Teachers often instruct some skills of doing detail inference items,which leads to their good performance in doing detail items.Teachers often hold guessing word-meaning activities and provide clues for students in reading class,which contribute to students’ good inference ability though not as good as that in detail inference items.Not finding the gist according to which students can judge the author’s attitude is the main factor of poor pragmatic inference in doing attitude inference items.Not providing as much background information as possible,paying little attention to analyzing the structure of the passage,seldom training students’ ability of generalizing the main idea of the passage lead to the poorest performance in doing thematic inference items.According to the analysis of questionnaire,the author put forward some suggestions for English reading comprehension teaching.First,teachers should instruct the knowledge of word-formation.Second,teachers should guide students to find key words.Third,teachers should provide as much background information as possible.Fourth,teachers should train students’ ability of generalizing the main idea.