The Study Of English Reading Comprehension Process Within The Framework Of Relevance Theory

Reading is one of the important ways of acquiring and exchanging information for foreign language learners, and it is a potential communicative ability of readers. Reading is a very complex psychological and cognitive process, in which the author expresses his intensions, thinking and feelings in a written form, while the reader needs to understand the writer's real meaning with recognition, relevance and inference, which is hidden behind the language marks. This kind of communication is not a face-to-face process, so it is a special communicative form between the author and the reader, which is the very reason why the reader sometimes can't get the true meaning of the author.More attention has been paid to the improvement of students'comprehensive reading abilities for many years, and many English teachers hope to find out an appropriate theory that can be applied to the teaching of effective English reading. This thesis analyzes the cognitive nature and characteristics of reading comprehension, introduces three models that affect English reading greatly. After emphasizing the influence of these three models, their limitations are pointed out. Thereby, on the basis of the relevance theory, reading comprehension is examined from a new angle.The communicative cognition theory has been widely discussed in the field of linguistics since Sperber and Wilson first published their famous work Relevance: Communication and Cognition in 1986. Relevance theory was applied to all kinds of fields, such as psychology, literature, transtology and linguistics. However, there is not much work on exploring English comprehension reading process from relevance theoretic approach, especially for Chinese language learners in college. With the experience of learning and teaching, the author discovers that relevance theory can be used to explain English language comprehension process satisfactorily. Therefore, at the beginning of my thesis, some important points of relevance theory are discussed in details.In the framework of relevance theory, the thesis analyzes the essence of English language reading as follows: reading is a communicative process between reader and author; reading is a process of seeking optimal relevance; reading is an ostensive-inferential process. The thesis places more emphases on the discussion of the implicature, inference and dynamic context of reading process, relevance principles and the relation between relevance and reading comprehension. Then it concludes explicitly that the principle of relevance can help understand the real meaning of written text during the process of reading. So teachers'responsibility is to cultivate students'awareness of relevance and ability of seeking optimal relevance.As we all know, reading process involves many elements which may influence students'reading outcomes differently. Each person can meet such difficulties as the understanding of utterance, the explanation of discourse coherence and analysis of discourse styles, which are the most important elements that block the way of language reading. Due to the lack of scientific cognition toward the nature of reading, there are many misunderstandings in the teaching of English reading. If we can consider reading process from the perspective of relevance theory, both students and teachers can explicitly recognize the aim of reading comprehension and teachers can solve the problems they meet in reading class more easily. Meanwhile, relevance theory provides a scientific and effective theoretical base for teachers to teach English reading.This thesis introduces some significant points of relevance theory and the author discusses the ways to use these points to explain reading comprehension process, also explores how to use the relevance theory to choose the suitable reading materials, how to seek optimal relevance while reading, how to improve learners'relevance sensibility and interest, and how to design the strategies to teach English reading. The thesis comes to an end with a conclusion about limitations of this study, the problems in the present research as well as suggestions for further studies. The author hopes this study on English language reading from the perspective of relevance theory has positive implications for both teachers and students.