Cognitive Context And Its Meaning Construct In Written Communication

Cognitive context has a more important place in modern linguistics and plays a significant role both in linguistics and other relevant subjects. This thesis discusses cognitive context and its construct in written communication. The whole thesis includes four chapters. In introduction, a brief review is made on the significance of cognitive context and the whole structure of the thesis is generalized.Chapter one puts forward the necessity of studying cognitive context on the basis of reviewing traditional context and its limitations. The definition and characteristics of cognitive context are also explored. Cognitive context is a psychological construct and a subset assumption about human world; and its four characteristics are cognition, gestalt, humanity and dynamics, in which dynamics has the most prominent place in comprehending texts.Chapter two explores the interplay between cognitive context and written communication, which includes the definition and nature of written communication. Cognitive context has the function of restriction and interpretation towards written texts, and written texts can also monopoly or reconstruct cognitive context. In the interplay process, relevance theory plays a significant role in comprehension.Chapter three is devoted to effective ways of constructing cognitive context in written communication. Readers can comprehend texts and find implicit meanings effectively through constructing cognitive context by using background knowledge and mutual manifest information. Information within texts can also facilitate the construct of cognitive context. In this chapter, modal system, text topic and text organization are discussed, and these are all effective ways of constructing cognitive context.Chapter four is the methodology of the research. Questionnaires and interviews are adopted to verify the hypothesis that constructing cognitive context facilitates reading comprehension. And three questions are researched in this chapter: overall description of students'use of the knowledge of cognitive context; the differences in the use of the knowledge of cognitive context between successful and less successful learners; and the relevance of constructing cognitive context to reading comprehension. In order to better verify the significance of constructing cognitive context in written texts, the author designs several interview questions to find out the reasons lying in these differences.Finally, the conclusion is achieved: constructing cognitive context can really facilitate reading comprehension. In addition, the author points out pedagogical implications, limitations of the present study and expectations about the future study.