The Application Of Cognitive Context To Reading In College EFL Teaching

Reading is one of the important ingredients of foreign language learning. In nature, it is a communication between the writer and reader and is a very complex psychological and cognitive process carried out through printed letters as well. Although many studies have been implemented in this field in the past, few of them are from cognitive context perspective.This thesis aims to explore the effect of cognitive context in the relevance theory on English reading teaching in college. Context exerts a determining influence on language communication. The traditional context theory gives full attention to the elements of language and factors of context, but it mainly emphasizes the overall external aspects of language using from a static angle and ignores the subjective factor of people in communication. Thus, traditionally, context exists before communication and it is static.However, in recent years, with the development of cognitive science as well as the further research of language communication, context endowed with new meanings. In 1986, Sperber and Wilson proposed the relevance theory in their book in which communication is regarded as an ostensive-inferential process. In relevance theory, the notion of cognitive context is the core, because relevance is context-dependent, the relevance of utterance is regarded as the relationship between proposition and a series of contexts. 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 understanding utterance is a series of assumptions which form the hearer's cognitive context, not concrete situational aspects. In terms of this, context involves not only co-text and the physical 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. Reading is not a direct communicative activity, but 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 communication. Consequently, the relevance-theoretic cognitive context theory should be applicable in reading.The traditional language teaching model partially emphasizes to improve the exam-oriented reading skills, ignorant of probing into the students' whole reading process, thus this model fails to provide an effective approach for improving 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 relevance theory, this thesis mainly focuses on the role of cognitive context in reading. The application of cognitive context makes it necessary that the leading task of a teacher is to guide students to take reading as a whole process and 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 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 fulfill the optimal relevance in the internal text.In order to check the effect of cognitive context in the relevance theory on English reading, the writer conducts a comparative experiment between one class instructed by the traditional teaching method and the other by cognitive context method. Through the empirical study, the author demonstrates the positive role of cognitive context in improving students'reading ability.