Relevance Theory In The Teaching Of L2 Listening Comprehension

Due to the importance of listening comprehension among the four basic foreign/second language acquisition skills, considerable attention has been given to the pedagogic method of improving listeners' proficiency.Mainstream listening comprehension researches are mainly from a psycholinguistic perspective, schematic perspective, and SLA perspective. Although these different perspectives have led to our overall understanding, our knowledge about the nature of listening comprehension process is still far from being complete.The Relevance Theory (RT) has been widely and successfully applied to analyzing stylistic features, translation, syntax, discourse, media discourse and so on. Nevertheless, literature on its application to listening comprehension is seldom documented. This paper is an attempt to explain listening comprehension under the relevance-theoretic framework and propose applying RT to the teaching of L2 listening comprehension.