Teaching English Listening Comprehension: A Relevance-Based Model

Starting from our opening up to the outside world in the 70's, people have begun to realize the importance of English which has become an indispensable part of education in China. Moreover, with the reforms in English teaching, more and more scholars and language teachers have already begun to switch their focus from language itself to communicative competence, that is, speaking and listening capability. Listening may come first to be a big headache facing many Chinese students. In school, they receive the outdated listening-teaching model: Playing the tape---choosing the answer---explaining the answer, which does not benefit students. What is worse, the academic researches concerning domestic English listening teaching have not seen a proportionate development, compared with those done concerning reading and writing. Because of this lack of theoretical framework, most publications dealing with listening-teaching and listening strategies are profit-driven, thus resulting in the ineffectiveness and inefficiency in listening teaching.This thesis, after proving the fact that process of listening is also a kind of communication, draws on Sperber and Wilson's principle of relevance, which is originally designed for the interpretation of verbal communication, to explain how the answers are chosen in listening practice. It is found out that the process of choosing the best answers is actually also the process of seeking optimal relevance to have maximal contextual effect. It follows that a new type of model for teaching listening will be constructed, a set of listening strategies are justified and further theoretically based, various perspectives and levels of relevance in listening practice are recognized and dwelt on, and finally implications are drawn for improvement of listening teaching in China.This thesis consists of four chapters:Chapter One is the introduction, which presents what Chinese students face when they want to improve their listening capability and main purposes that the writer intends to find out through this thesis.Chapter Two presents the definition and development of English listening. A comprehensive review and remark on listening teaching models will be given.Chapter Three begins with the content of principle of relevance and analyze the interrelationship between listening comprehension and principle of relevance. More importantly, a relevance-based model for teaching English listening is established.Chapter Four is the conclusion, which goes over the whole thesis and summarizes the significance of this model for teaching English listening as well as the disadvantage of this relevance-based model.