The Study On Cognitive Context And English Reading Teaching

Context is the environment where language is used. It came into being from the very beginning of the year 1923, when Malinowski put forward the notion of situational context. According to the traditional context theory, context includes linguistic context and nonlinguistic context, and it involves the overall external aspects of language using, which restricts the understanding of utterance. Meanwhile, these aspects have existed before communication, and the communicators infer on the basis of the former cognitive aspects. Thus context exists before communication. (Xidian Guangzheng, 1992) From this angle, context is static.However, in recent years, with the appearance of cognitive science as well as the further research of language communication, context has been redefined. In 1986, Sperber and Wilson proposed the relevance theory in their book Relevance: Communication & Cognition, in which communication is regarded as an ostensive-inferential process. In relevance theory, S&W put forward the notion of cognitive context for the first time, which is the core of RT, because relevance is context-dependent, the relevance of utterance is regarded as the relationship between "P "(proposition) and a series of contexts from C₁ to C_n. The series of assumptions used to interpret utterance forms context. Context is a psychological construct, a series of assumptions stored in human being's mind, and it is the mutual manifest "cognitive context" in communication. In the process of communication, the key to understand utterance is a series of assumptions which form the hearer's cognitive context, not concrete situational aspects. From this sense, context involves not only co-text and the then material environment where the communication takes place, but also expectations for future, scientific hypothesis, religious belief, assumption, faith, memory, cultural knowledge and the inherent view on the mental state of the speaker.Although reading comprehension is not a direct communicative activity, it essentially belongs to a communicative manner between the writer and the reader, therefore, just like language communication, reading is also a manifest-inferential dynamic and cognitive process, and must follow the rule of language commutation. Consequently, the relevance-theoretic cognitive context theory is applicable in this specified communicative process——reading.The traditional language teaching model partially emphasized to improve the examoriented reading skills, ignorant of probing into the students' whole reading process, thus this model failed to provide an effective approach for advancing reading ability. The dynamic cognitive context makes a good enlightenment on foreign language teaching. It tells us language should change from static survey back to life, foreign language teaching should eliminate the approach of instructing pure knowledge, and create a linguistic environment in favor of students' language perception, and then to elevate the pragmatic competence of the students.Based on discussing the defects of reading models before relevance theory, this thesis dwells on the role of cognitive context in decoding reading. The application of cognitive context strongly suggests that the leading task of a teacher is to guide students to appropriately select and construct their cognitive contexts so that they can achieve optimal relevance and successful comprehension.To enhance reading efficiency, on the one hand, the teacher should not only provide the students with the grammatical knowledge, but also enlarge the input of background knowledge, encyclopedic knowledge and cultural knowledge, which guarantee the functioning of cognitive context; On the other hand, the teacher should instruct the students to read in context to promote their consciousness of contextualization, and through predicting as well as analyzing and dynamically inferring to obtain the interaction between writer and the reader. Moreover, the teacher should enlighten them to select relevant assumptions in their cognitive environment to achieve mutual-manifestness, and finally be able to interpret the optimal relevance in the internal text. Furthermore, through empirical study and questionnaire analysis, the author demonstrates the positive role of cognitive context in improving reading efficiency.