The Application Of Relevance Theory To Teaching English Reading Comprehension In Junior Middle School

Teaching of reading is one of the most important parts in Junior EFL class. Reading isthought to be the most effective and important channel of linguistic input by which learnerscan develop competence. However, in current Junior English teaching, the teaching of basicvocabulary, grammar occupies most of the time of the English class. This "focusing on parts,ignoring the whole" reading model obstacles the learners’improvement in reading proficiency.In the past 50 years, research on reading comprehension has made remarkable improvement.With the development of reading theory and introduction of reading techniques, Englishreading teaching is being slowly shifted from "teaching languages points only " to "regardingteaching of reading as an interactive process", thus making us have a brief understanding ofthe reading properties. In spite of the improvement, student’s lack of profound insights intothe essence of reading comprehension. As the main function of learning a language iscommunication, the thesis writer attempts to view reading from another perspective and solvethe relevant problems in the light of communicative theory, especially in the light ofrelevance theory. From Saussure’s semiotics, Austin’s Speech Act Theory, Grice’sCooperative Principle to Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory, communicative theory hasexperienced some important development stages. Since Sperber and Wilson first proposedRelevance Theory in the book Relevance: Communication and Cognition in 1986, it has beenapplied in various fields such as psychology, literature, translation and other branches oflinguistics such as semantics, syntax, stylistics, rhetoric and discourse analysis. However,little research has been done in the application of the theory to reading comprehension,especially reading comprehension by Chinese Junior students. In the process of teachingreading, the author discovers that relevance theory can make a profound explanation toreading comprehension. Based on the framework of relevance theory, the thesis analyzes thenature of reading comprehension as the following: Reading is a process of communicationbetween the reader and the writer; a process of seeking optimal relevance on the part of thereader; a process of making inference from the ostension-inference communication. In orderto assess the effects of the application of relevance theory to reading comprehension, theauthor conducts an experiment in Class 7, Grade 7 in branch of Qingdao No.7 Middle School,teaching them reading comprehension with input of relevance theory. The English level ofthese subjects is supposed to be intermediate and low. Through the five months of interview,pre-test, observation and post-test, the thesis comes to the conclusion that relevance theoryplays positive roles for the most intermediate-level students in reading comprehension, especially in cultivating the students’inference ability in the specific context. But for thestudents of poor command of English, the result is not so satisfactory. This group of studentslack of linguistic competence to make the best use of the theory. They are advised to readsome easier materials to improve their linguistic competence and communicative competenceas well. Finally, some suggestions are presented in answer to those current problems inreading comprehension.