The Application Of Relevance Theory To College English Reading Teaching

Reading is one of the important ways of acquiring and exchanging information for foreign language learners. Reading is a communication between the writer and the reader. It's a very complex psychological and cognitive process carried out through printed letters by the reader and the writer. Although many studies have been carried out in this field in the past, few of them were relevance-based.During the 1980s to the 1990s, the famous French cognitive psychologist Dan Sperber and the famous linguist in London University Deirdre Wilson proposed relevance theory, which is based on study of Grice. "The aim is to develop a mode of specific psychological cognition, and to propose a new way on the study of human communication."((何自然, 1997: 139 note: writer's translation) Relevance combines communication and cognition, develops the thoughts of implicature into a touchable mode of psychological cognition. It announces that linguistic communication is a process to cognition. Meanwhile,何兆熊(2000: 183) agreed with Grice that the process to understand utterance was an inferential process relying on context, a process to interpret the purpose of the speaker and a process to make inferential communication. For reading comprehension, relevance theory has the same effect. The activity of reading is the mutual communication between readers and the writer.This thesis makes an attempt to study reading comprehension by applying Relevance Theory proposed by Sperber& Wilson (1986/1995). From a perspective of relevance, reading comprehension can be viewed as follows: 1) the aim of reading comprehension is to obtain the writer's intended meanings, however, the author's real meanings are very often not in words on the page. The reader needs to construct meanings by making inferences. 2) Reading comprehension is an inferential process in which the reader uses his encyclopedic, logical and lexical knowledge to process the incoming new information. 3) Optimal relevance is measured in terms of contextual effect: contextual implication, the confirmation or elimination of the already-held assumption. Meanwhile when processing the information the readers' effort should be worthwhile and necessary. Hence how to search the optimal relevant information to form a context for inference within limited time is the key point to improve the efficiency of reading comprehension.First of all the writer has provided the handouts, materials and examples from the texts in his reading teaching followed with according illustrations that help the students learn reading with the guidance of relevance theory. Secondly, in order to check the application of relevance theory to reading comprehension, the author conducts a comparative experiment between one class with traditional teaching method and another with input of relevance theory. Before experiment, the average English levels of these two classes are almost the same in the final exam of the first semester. The subjects of the experiment are all from Zhejiang Wanli University. Through the three stages of pre-test, observation and post-test, the thesis comes to the conclusion that relevance theory plays positive roles in reading comprehension, especially in cultivating the students' inference ability in the specific context.