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

With the deepening of the globalization of the economic activities, communication in economy and science with other countries becomes more frequent than before. English plays a much more important role in people's daily life. In senior high school, English is an important subject. With the implement of the New Curriculum Standard of Senior English, courses of senior high school should be adapted to students'cognitive characters and the needs of their academic developments. The courses of senior high school should lay emphasis on improving students'abilities to obtain knowledge, process information, to analyze and solve problems in addition to developing students'abilities and skills of the basic language using.Compared to the demanding of the New Curriculum Standard of Senior English, the abilities of students'English reading are not very optimistic. The traditional teaching approach which mainly focuses on the instruction of new words, grammar and the language points and neglects the cultivation of abilities may be one of the main reasons that caused this kind of situation. Students'have increased their quantity of vocabulary, and they can make sentences without mistakes of grammar. However, the efficiency of their English reading is not obviously improved.Reading is a very complex psychological and cognitive process, in which the writer expresses his intentions, thinking and feelings in a written form. In the process, the reader needs to understand the writer's real meaning with recognition, relevance and inference, which is hidden behind the language marks.In recent years, more attention has been paid to the improvement of the students'abilities of reading comprehension of senior high school education, and many English teachers hope to find out an appropriate theory that can be used in the process of the teaching of English reading. The author analyzes the cognitive nature and characters of reading comprehension, introduces four kinds of reading models that affect English reading. After emphasizing the influence of these models, their defects are pointed out. Therefore, reading comprehension is examined from a new perspective on the basis of relevance theory.According to the relevance theory, reading is a communicative process between the reader and the writer. Reading is a process of seeking optimal relevance. Reading is an ostensive-inferential process. The thesis places more emphasis on the discussion of the implicature and inference, the principle of relevance and the relation between relevance and reading comprehension. Then, it concludes explicitly that the principle of relevance can help understand the real meaning of written text during the process of reading. Therefore, the responsibility of a teacher is to cultivate students'awareness of relevance and ability of seeking optimal relevance. The author holds that the relevance theory might offer new insight into the research on teaching reading in a theoretic sense. Thus, the author puts forward the relevance-theoretic reading model and proposes a hypothesis that this model is effective in directing reading in English.In order to prove the hypothesis, the author designed two tests, an interview and a questionnaire. The author hopes to find the answers to these two questions:1) Is relevance-theoretic reading model more effective than the four traditional models in the process of reading comprehension?2) What are the students'comments about the relevance-theoretic reading model? During the period of the internship, two classes are randomly selected to be participants in the experiment. The relevance-theoretic approach is used in the experimental class, and the traditional teaching reading approaches are used in the control class. In the experimental class, the relevance theory is used in directing teaching strategies. The teacher chooses suitable materials for the students'exercises. The relevance-theoretic approach is used to the analysis of discourse and writing style. The teacher guides students to suitably infer the writer's intention by helping them construct relevant contextual assumptions. After that the students can try to achieve the optimal relevance and successful comprehension.More than three months later, a post-test is given to both classes. It is found that there is obvious disparity between them through the questionnaire and the post-test. The data collected is analyzed and processed by Excel. The score of the experimental class has obviously improved compared to that of the control class. The standard deviation of the experimental class has decreases a lot. However, the disparity for the students of the control class has become larger. It is found in the thesis that the relevance-theoretic model is more effective than traditional approaches used in the process of teaching English reading in senior high school.