Research On The Relevance Theory-Based English Reading Teaching In High Schools

Reading documents in foreign languages has been a major channel to acquire latest international information directly and quickly. Consequently, learning to read documents in English has become a necessary skill, one that English teachers focus on. Meanwhile, the senior English course, based on further developing the students' overall ability to use language, emphasizes the improvement in the students' ability to acquire information, deal with information, analyze problems and solve problems. Besides, it gives special emphasis to the enhancement of the ability to think and express themselves in English as well as the forming of consciousness and the basic ability of inter-cultural communication so as to further expand their range of vision of the world and strengthen their patriotism spirit and the sense of democracy mission. Thus, it can help students form the wholesome sensation emotion., attitude and point of value and lay the foundation for their future development and lifelong learning (Xuqinggen ,Jia guangjie,2005:13).Considering the social demand, the understanding of the requirement of the full-time compulsory education English curriculum standard (experimental manuscript) and the current status: the students in our school can't develop reading ability and comprehensive quality simultaneously, the paper probes English reading teaching in high schools by combining the modern relevance theory, and puts forward the point of view that the four-layer reading teaching can help improve the students' English reading ability and overall quality.Relevance theory holds the view that looking for the relevance during every communication between people is one big characteristic of man's cognition. As a potential communicative activity between reader and writer, reading is a very complex psychological and cognitive process. Writer expresses his mind, purpose, emotion and so on through printed letters, while reader understands the writer's mind, purpose, emotion and so on by recognizing the printed letters, looking for relevance and inference so as to realize the communication between them.The paper raises a four-layer English reading teaching, based on the understanding of the nature of reading by relevance theory. During the four-layer reading process, the reader infers the implied meaning of the printed letters layer by layer combining the context, while developing the students' overall quality during the inferring process which breaks down the traditional teaching that only focuses on skill training but ignores the students' non-utilitarian education in mind in reading process. I hope the tentative research on the English reading teaching from the human's cognition aspect can enlighten other researchers on English reading teaching and provide them a practical direction.