Relevance Theory And Reading Comprehension

Reading plays a critical role in human communication, and it is regarded as a primary skill to acquire in the field of foreign language teaching. Therefore, up to date, a considerable number of language scholars have done a great amount of research about reading, and then have put forth bulky theories of reading. The mainstream reading theories mainly focus on three well-known approaches to reading, which are respectively the bottom-up approach, the top-down approach and the interactive approach. The bottom-up approach views reading as a decoding process of reconstructing the author's intended meaning via recognizing the printed letters and words, and building up a meaning for a text from the smallest textual units at the "bottom"(letters or words) to larger and larger units at the "top"(phrases, clauses, intersentential linkages). By contrast, the top-down approach perceives reading as a psycholinguistic guessing game in which the reader reconstructs a message which has been encoded by a writer as a graphic display. In comparison with both of them, the interactive approach regards reading as an interactive process, in which the bottom-up processing and the top-down processing interact with each other. In recent decades, great interest has also been aroused in the schema-theoretic approach, which results from the application of the schema theory to reading comprehension and is actually a special version of the interactive approach with stresses placed over the role of background knowledge in the comprehension process. Though these various approaches interpret the reading process from manifold perspectives, none of them can well integrate all the aspects possibly involved in the reading process. Nevertheless, no matter from what perspective, there is always a consensus idea that reading is in general terms an important mode of human communication. D. Sperber and D. Wilson have proposed the relevance theory, which provides a new approach to human communication from the cognitive perspective. In comparison with the traditional code model, it reflects the process of communication more truly and comprehensively. It regards the process of communication as an ostensive-inferential one, in which the communicator is involved in ostension while the audience in inference. According to the RT, human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance and every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance. What to communicate for understanding is the communicator's intention, which falls into informative intention and communicative intention. Only on the condition that communicative intention is fulfilled can successful communication be achieved. To grasp the communicative intention, the audience needs to do inference, construct certain context according to theprinciple of relevance and realize the ultimate goal of achieving the optimal relevance. As is mentioned, reading is a way of communication. Therefore, the relevance theory can also apply to accounting for the reading process. Based on this, we propose a new approach to reading, that is, the relevance-theoretic approach. Following the detailed interpretation of the reading process under the framework of the relevance-theoretic approach, we mainly focus on the applications of this approach to reading teaching. In addition, the significant implications of this approach are also discussed through contrasting it with other approaches mentioned in this thesis. Although a considerable number of language scholars have done the research of the RT in various areas, such as translation, grammar, and discourse analysis, few of them have done the research of the RT in the field of reading teaching. As for the available related research, they mainly focus on the interpretation of reading comprehension under the framework of the RT and the implications and applications of the RT in reading teaching. But they seem to share the limitation that they just concentrate on one or two aspects, which results in their incomprehensive and unsystematic exploration. The significance of this thesis is that it elucidates the interpretation of the reading process under the framework of the relevance-theoretic approach and illustrates in detail how this approach can be applied more systematically and comprehensively to the entire process of reading teaching. Furthermore, since the relevance theory reflects the process of communication more truly,comprehensively and systematically, the relevance-theoretic approach to reading comprehension based on it can better integrate all the aspects possibly involved in the reading process than other mentioned approaches.Therefore, it demonstrates more valuable implications for teaching reading. This thesis consists of six parts, including Introduction and Conclusion. The introduction part presents a brief introduction of the current reading research, the relevance theory and the significance of this thesis. Chapter one primarily reviews the mainstream reading theories, focusing on the three approaches to reading as well as the schema-theoretic approach to reading. As to each approach, we discuss what they mean, their respective strengths and weaknesses and their influences over teaching reading. This part plays a transitional role in developing the whole thesis. On the one hand, it surveys the leading research on approaches to reading; on the other, it introduces a new approach to reading, the relevance-theoretic approach, which is the focus of the next part. Chapter two is the theoretical part, which illustrates in detail how the reading comprehension process can be accounted for according to the relevance-theoretic approach. It first presents that the relevance theory provides a new and more scientific approach to communication in comparison with the traditional code model. Then the applicability of the RT to reading is discussed and correspondingly all the rest centers on the detailed interpretation of the relevance-theoretic approach to the readingcomprehension process. All these analyses lay solid foundations for later discussion. Chapter three is a tentative study of the application of the relevance-theoretic approach in reading teaching practice, which is the focus of the whole thesis. In order to discuss it systematically and comprehensively, we can divide the whole reading process into three stages, which are the pre-, during-and after-reading stages. At each stage, particular tasks and activities can be designed according to the relevance-theoretic approach in order to guide students to appropriately infer the writer's intention by helping them construct relevant contextual assumptions so that they can achieve optimal relevance and successful comprehension. Since Chinese students'reading in English is a kind of intercultural communication, another important task for the teacher is to help students construct relevant cultural context and pay special attention to the role of culture in successful comprehension. By doing all these, the teacher is expected to teach students how to comprehend and develop various reading skills. All this proves the great practicability of the relevance-theoretic approach in reading teaching. In Chapter four we mainly explore the significant implications of the relevance-theoretic approach by comparing it with other approaches to reading mentioned in this thesis. Through the comparison, it can be seen that the relevance-theoretic approach manifests its advantages in four aspects: (a) it interprets reading comprehension from the perspective of communication...