On The Empirical Research Of Relevance Theory To The Teaching Of English Reading In Senior High School

Reading plays an important role in language learning, especially in today's college entranceexamination. Traditional reading teaching always emphasizes on teacher's explanation and analysis, butneglects students' dominant position. Therefore, the research and application of new and effective readingclass teaching mode is imperative.Reading is a very complex psychological and cognitive process, in which the writer expresses hisintensions, design and feelings in a written form. In the process, the reader needs to understand the writer'sreal 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 readingcomprehension in senior high school education, and many English teachers hope to find out an appropriatetheory that can be used in the process of teaching English reading. The author analyzes the cognitive natureand characters of reading comprehension, introduces three kinds of reading models that affect Englishreading. After emphasizing the influence of these models, their defects are pointed out. Therefore, readingcomprehension 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 thewriter. Reading is a process of seeking optimal relevance. Reading is an ostensive-inferential process. Thethesis puts more emphasis on the discussion of the hint and inference, the principle of relevance and therelation between relevance and reading comprehension. Then, it infers explicitly that the principle ofrelevance can help understand the real meaning of written text during the process of reading. Therefore, theresponsibility of a teacher is to cultivate students' awareness of relevance and ability of seeking optimalrelevance. The author holds the point that the relevance theory might offer new insight into the research onteaching reading in a theoretic sense.In this study, the subjects are from two classes in Suiping Senior High School of Henan Province. Inthis study, questionnaires, pre-test, experiment, post-test, and interviews are used. The research process isdivided into three stages: questionnaire and analysis stage, experiment and data collection stage and dataanalysis and thesis writing stages. 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, therelevance theory is used in directing teaching strategies. The teacher chooses suitable materials for thestudents' 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 relevantcontextual assumptions. After that the students can try to achieve the optimal relevance and successfulcomprehension. Nearly four months later, a post-test is given to both classes. The score of the experimentalclass has obviously improved compared to that of the control class. The standard deviation of theexperimental class has decreases a lot. However, the disparity for the students of the control class hasbecome larger. It is found in the thesis that the relevance-theoretic model is more effective than traditionalapproaches used in the process of teaching English reading.