A Study Of Pragmatic Inference And Its Implications For The Teaching Of College English Reading

Reading comprehension is a complex psychological activity, it's the communication between the writer and the reader, while the essence of communication is a process of ostension - inference. Sperber& Wilson proposed relevance theory and discussed about pragmatic inference. Pragmatic inference is making in a dynamic cognitive environment, and through the mutual manifestness of the shared cognitive environment, the goal of communication is achieved. Many scholars are concerned with this and develop the theory. However, there are few studies on the application of the above theory to the teaching of reading comprehension.Therefore, the first experiment aims at finding out the relation between grammatical competence and pragmatic inference ability, and then the training is conducted to investigate whether students'pragmatic inference ability can be improved after the purposeful training.The study is analyzed with SPSS 14.0. With the data analysis and discussion, some findings are put forward. There is a discrepancy between students'grammatical competence and pragmatic inference ability, and this makes students not able to read efficiently and fail to grasp the real intention of the writer. So it's necessary to integrate the pragmatic inference strategies teaching into the reading class, and after the training, the results show that students have improved significantly in this aspect. Meanwhile the results also indicate that students'grammatical competence has a certain impact on their progress of pragmatic inference ability. All these findings and suggestions may pave a way for further research and contribute to the improvement of students reading comprehension.