Understanding Reading-From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Based on the current understanding of reading, this thesis attempts to explain the reading process from the perspective of relevance theory. Relevance theory is a cognitive psychological theory for human communication. As reading is a communication process between the writer and the reader, and as reading comprehension is basically a cognitive psychological process of the human mind, we maintain that relevance theory is definitely adequate to accounting for reading.Our major concern is what the nature of reading is, how reading comprehension is achieved and under what circumstances is successful comprehension possible. To attain this goal, we adopt the relevance theory as a ready made approach to probe into the matter of reading, trying to find out how our human brains work in the process of reading and what prerequisites are needed for successful comprehension to occur. It is strongly felt that an understanding of the reading process, especially of the comprehension process, will be beneficial not only in opening our view to a broader and deeper field of the reading theory, but also in laying the foundation for guiding the reading practice in real life, especially in second language reading practice.In the framework of relevance theory, reading is seen as an ostensive-inferential communication process in which the writer composes sentences to be used as ostensive stimuli to attract the reader's attention and encourage him to construct the intended meaning. The reader is attracted to the sentences because they convey a presumption of optimal relevance and because human cognition is geared to the maximization of relevance. Hence the reader is confident to employ ways of decoding and inference to recover the intended explicatures (explicit content) and implicatures (implicated premises and conclusions) of the written sentences, achieving an understanding roughly equivalent to the writer's meaning. What the reader needs to do in this process is to follow the path of least effort, construct hypotheses about the writer's meaning until his expectations of relevance are satisfied.