Study On English Listening Comprehension At Vocational Colleges From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Listening comprehension is one of the most important contents of college English teaching. In recent years, studies on listening comprehension are mainly conducted from the Psycholinguistic Perspective, the Schema Perspective and the Pragmatic Perspective. This thesis first reviews these studies and summarizes their achievements and drawbacks, then introduces some important notions of relevance theory, such as relevance, context, mutual manifestness and ostensive inferential communication, and elaborates the relevance-theoretic listening comprehension. According to relevance theory, listening process is a process of constantly seeking relevance, in which the personal cognitive environments (lexical information, background information and inferring ability etc) have vital effect on seeking for relevance thus affect listening comprehension.So this thesis is intended to answer the questions as follows:(1) Whether the students unconsciously use the approach of relevance theory to comprehend what they have heard?(2) How does a student’s cognitive environment influence his or her listening comprehension?(3) Is there any feasibility that the relevance theory can guide the English listening comprehension teaching at vocational colleges? To answer these questions, a survey and a test are held on100non-English major freshmen from Sichuan Technology and Business College and data analysis is made by SPSS. The findings are:(1) Students make use of relevance theory definitely and unconsciously in the process of listening comprehension;(2) Personal cognitive environment has effect on students’listening comprehension competence;(3) Enhancing students’cognitive environment is conductive to improving their listening comprehension competence.Based on these results, the study comes up with some implications for the teaching of college English listening:Enabling the students to use key words to seek relevance so as to help them narrow and broaden the meaning of words based on the content; enriching students’personal background knowledge in various ways and improving students’ability of making predictions and inferences as much as possible.