Pragmatic Inference In English Reading Comprehension

A lot of demerits exist in traditional reading teaching, which thinks that reading is a simple process of encoding and decoding .The teachers and learners only emphasize on words, phrases and simple sentences, but ignore the writer's writing intention and some relevant background knowledge. Usually, the readers don't fully understand what the text is about though they have a large vocabulary. So it is more important for us to explore how to foster their practical language ability, including the ability of pragmatic inference, so as to enhance the students' reading ability.Reading is a cognitive process in nature, not a simple process of encoding and decoding. It also involves inference. The notion of pragmatic inference is reflected in Gricean theory and Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory. However, Grice's theory of conversational implicature cannot clearly explain communication inference. Relevance Theory provides a much more reasonable inferential model. Reading comprehension is a typical communicative process, during which the reader makes inference to comprehend the ostensive intension conveyed by the author in reading passages, searching relevance in a cognitive context. Relevance Theory also provides a theoretical frame for English reading comprehension teaching. The thesis also makes an attempt to improve reading teaching by analyzing the process of English reading comprehension and offering some reading strategies within the frame of Relevance Theory.