The Application Of Relevance Theory To The Teaching Of English Reading In Senior High Schools

Due to the importance of reading comprehension among the four basic foreign/second language acquisition skills, considerable attention has been paid to the pedagogic approach of improving reading proficiency of readers. Reading comprehension is an interdisciplinary area. Mainstream researches on reading comprehension are mainly from a psycholinguistic perspective, schematic perspective, and SLA perspective. 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 the inner mechanism of human communication. It has been widely and successfully applied to analyzing stylistic features, translation, syntax, discourse, media discourse and so on. This thesis is an attempt to expound the reading comprehension process and wish to explore an effective 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 to obtain the writer's intended meaning. Reading is regarded 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 relevance to them by inference. Readers follow a general principle - search for optimal relevance, in the whole process actively. Therefore, how to search the optimal relevant information by means of inference to form contextual effects within limited time is the key to improve the efficiency of reading comprehension.The thesis formulates a relevance-theoretic English reading model, in which readers...