Relevance Theory And Its Application To The Promotion Of High School Students' Inference Ability In Reading

Due to the importance of reading comprehension among the four basic foreign/second language acquisition skills (including Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing), considerable attention has been paid to the pedagogic approach to improving reading of readers. Comprehension is an interdisciplinary area. Proficiency Mainstream researches on reading are mainly from perspective of psycholinguistics, schematic and SLA. Although these different perspectives have led to our overall understanding the nature of reading comprehension process, the question of how to carry out the process of reading and achieve successful reading is still far from being complete. Relevance Theory (RT) proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1995), as a communicative theory of cognitive pragmatics, is dedicated to the studies of the ostensive-inferential communication and oriented to establish a general principle of interpreting successfully the inner mechanism of human communication. It has been widely applied to analyzing stylistic features, translation, syntax, discourse, media discourse and so on. This thesis is a process and we wish to explore an effective attempt to expound the reading comprehension reading model in the RT framework to apply to the teaching of English reading in senior high schools.From the perspective of RT, the aim of reading comprehension is regarded to obtain the writer's intended meaning. Reading is as an ostensive-inferential communication, which is a psycholinguistic process: readers start with a set of linguistic symbols (ostensive stimuli) that have been chosen by writers to represent the thought that they wish to express; it ends when readers have interpreted as much of the writer's intended meaning as is relevant to them by inference. Readers follow a general principle,searching for optimal relevance, in the whole process actively. Therefore, how to seek for the optimal relevant information by means of inference to form contextual effects within limited time is the key to improving the efficiency of reading comprehension.The author compares the experimental group with the control group and investigates the students with a questionnaire method. Twice questionnaires have been conducted; meanwhile, the students take two exams before and after the experiment. After that the author collects all the data and analyses them statistically by using SPSS16.0 for windows to conduct a comparative study of the correlation analysis.The results show that: Relevance Theory and its application can promote the high school students' reading ability, especially the inference ability in reading. Further more, the students have gradually realized that the more difficult the reading material is, the more frequent of inference strategy is used and the richer background knowledge is required. As a result, the students have more enthusiasm to take part in reading activities.