Application Of Relevance Theory To Reading Teaching In Senior High School

Relevance Theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson can be used to interpet how people construct the context according to the relevance between things, and related the new information to the existing ones to achieve a logical conclusion in the process of comprehension. Relevance Theory confirms the great dynamic role of the cognitive subjects and people's capacity of psychology. Under the framework of Relevance Theory, the nature of reading comprehension is considered to be as follows: 1. Reading comprehension is a communication between the author and the reader, and the goal of reading is to get the author's communication intention. 2. Reading is considered as an inference-making process, in which the reader deals with the new information through his own encyclopedic information, logical information and linguistic information. 3. Reading is considered as a process of seeking optimal relevance. What is more, the context that reading comprehension heavily relies on, is a dynamic psychological construction which is developed in the course of interaction. Hence how to search the optimal relevant information to form a context for inference is the key to improve the efficiency of reading comprehension.Because RT has strong power to explain reading comprehension, an exploratory study of applying RT to English reading teaching in Senior High School is conducted by the writer. There are three specific questions designed by the writer in the study, and they are as follows:(1) Can the teaching of reading based on RT training produce significant effect on the students'awareness of cognitive strategies in reading?(2) Can the teaching of reading based on RT training significantly improve students'reading comprehension proficiency? (3) In terms of the different reading content styles (narration, exposition and argumentation), can the teaching of reading based on RT training have similar effectiveness on improving the students'reading comprehension proficiency?This thesis is an empirical study. The subjects are 80 students from YunCheng PingLu Senior High School. They had attended an experimental teaching of reading for one semester. The author used the Independent Samples and Paired Samples T-Tests of SPSS(11.5) to analyze and compare the data from pre-test and post-test. Through data analysis and discussion, as well as the answers from the interview conducted in experimental class, the author got the findings of this research as follows:(1) The teaching of reading based on RT training can produce significant effect on the students'awareness of cognitive strategies in reading, especially on the aspects of predicting, contextualization, inferring and structure analysis.(2) The teaching of reading based on RT training can significantly improve students'reading comprehension proficiency.(3) Through the teaching of reading based on RT training, students'reading proficiency in the three different styles improved differently. Students'reading proficiency in the narration got improved obviously, but not in the exposition and argumentation.It can be seen that applying RT to reading teaching has positive and practical significance to some extent. At the same time, the author puts forward some implications and suggestions for improving the reading teaching in Senior High School.