Relevance Theory And Listening Comprehension

Mainstream listening comprehension researches to date can be roughly categorized into four tributaries. First of all, from a psycholinguistic perspective, researchers approached listening comprehension from three interrelated and recursive processes: perceptual processing (focusing on the perception of sounds and storing them in memory), parsing (probing into how listeners use words to construct meaning) and utilization (examining into how listeners connect what is heard with what is already known). Secondly, by adopting the Schema Theory, researchers envisaged listening comprehension as involving or displaying two opposite information processing orientations, top-down and bottom-up. During a top-down processing process, listeners are observed to deploy their knowledge of the world, situations and roles of human interaction to comprehend meaning; while in a bottom-up information retrieving process, listeners are observed to use their knowledge of words, syntax, and grammar to work on form. Then, from the pragmatic point of view, researchers attached great importance of context in listening comprehension. Finally, in the area of SLA research, scholars have demonstrated strong interests in finding out factors affecting the learners' listening. Although these different perspectives have led to our overall understanding, nevertheless, our knowledge about the nature of listening comprehension process is still far from being complete.The Relevance Theory (RT) is first proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1986) in their book Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Over the decade, it has been widely and successfully applied to analyze stylistic features, translation, syntax, discourse, literature, media discourse and so on. Nevertheless, literature on its application to listening comprehension is scantly documented. This thesis is an explicit attempt to explain listening comprehension under the Relevanc-theoretic framework.As far as I can see, interpreted from the RT perspective, (1) the aim of listening comprehension is to obtain the speaker's intended meaning. While grasping the speaker's informative intention, the listener's attention should be paid to the speaker's communicative intention. (2) As for the nature of listening comprehension is concerned, it is an inferential process in which the listener uses his encyclopedic, logical and lexical knowledge to process the incoming new information. In other words, the listener searches from his assumptions about the world in his preference and ability the most relevant information to complete the lacking premises for inference. (3) Different from our familiar conception of context, which utterance comprehension heavily relies on, it is a dynamic psychological construct and developed in the course of interaction. What is more, the selection of it is governed by the principle of relevance. Hence how to search the optimal relevant information to form a context for inference within limited time isthe key to improve the efficiency of listening comprehension. (4) Due to differences of individuals' cognitive environments, the result of comprehension to one utterance could not be the same. The same utterance, inferred in different context, might result in utterly different understandings, though listeners always hold the optimal one and give up the others.Based on the RT interpretation of the listening comprehension process, I have suggested:(1) that it is imperative to reconsider the teacher's role of the foreign language listening course. As far as I am concerned, listening comprehension course in present China is of transactional nature, and students in such a course have rare chance to interact with the speaker. An evident aspect is that the students' comprehension of the listening materials is reflected in answering the questions raised by the teacher. In this case, the teacher's intention is what the students need to recover in order to answer the questions correctly. The questions themselves and the optional answers for a multi-choice are factors that cons...