A Study Of Pragmatic Inference In Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension research to date has been approached from four perspectives. The first is from psychological perspective, in which reading comprehension is regarded as a process of guessing game. The second is from the pragmatic perspective, in which researchers attach great importance of context in reading comprehension. Thirdly, researchers view reading comprehension as involving two opposite information processing orientations: top-down and bottom-up. The fourth is from SLA perspective, in which scholars explore the factors affecting readers' reading. Although these different perspectives really led us to an overall understanding of reading, our knowledge of the nature and the process of reading comprehension is far from being complete.Since the Relevance Theory (RT) proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1986) over a decade ago, it has been widely used and successfully applied to the analysis of translation, syntax, discourse, literature and so on. Nevertheless, literature on its application to reading comprehension is largely neglected. The present study is an attempt to explore the nature of reading comprehension under the relevance-theoretic framework. From RT, reading comprehension can be viewed as follows: (1) Reading comprehension is a process of communication between the writer and the reader. The aim of reading comprehension is to obtain the author'sintended meaning. (2) Reading comprehension is an inferential process in which the reader uses his encyclopedia, logical and lexical knowledge to process the incoming information. (3) Reading comprehension is a process of seeking optimal relevance between the writer and the reader. It is a dynamic psychological construct and is developed in the course of interaction.Based on the analysis of the nature of reading comprehension, this study intends to address the following questions: Is there any relationship between English as a foreign language learner's grammatical competence and pragmatic inference ability? What are the pragmatic failures the learners tend to commit in making inference in reading comprehension?In order to answer these questions, a total of 94 subjects have been chosen as the sample for the study. The study is conducted in form of tests, which consist of two parts: the grammatical competence test and the pragmatic inference ability test. The investigation is analyzed by using quantitative analysis. The results are as follows: (1) Subjects of different language competence are different in their pragmatic inference abilities. (2) The language competence test results of the subjects generally do have medium correlation with those of their pragmatic inference ability test. (3) The subjects who are more competent in grammatical competence are not necessarily more competent in pragmatic inference ability. (4) The subjects who are less competent in grammaticalcompetence are relatively less competent in pragmatic inference ability.Based on the results of the study, exploration of possible factors affecting pragmatic inference in English reading comprehension are also analyzed from various perspectives.Finally, the study provides some suggestions for the teaching of reading by employing various reading strategies.