A Study On The Application Of The Optimal Relevance Theory In Teaching The Textual Reading Comprehension Of College English

The teaching of reading is supposed to be one of the most important courses in college English class. Reading is a communication between the reader and the writer; and it is a very complex psychological and cognitive process. This is a very special communication, which is carried out through printed letters by the reader and the writer. Writers code the letters into meaningful words, sentences and articles with their own meaning, intention, thoughts and emotion; while readers need to understand real meaning of the writer with recognition, relevance and inference, which is hidden behind the language marks. This kind of communication cannot be done through face to face between the reader and the writer. That is the reason why the reader often cannot manage to reach the real meaning of the writer’s.Traditional reading teaching modes are expressed by bottom-up, top-down, interactive and schema theory, with emphasis on their effects on reading strategies, and points out their shortcomings. So, based on relevance theory, this thesis examines the reading strategies in the context of Chinese learners of English. Then it makes a detailed discussion of the relevance theory, especially of the problems such as the implicative and inferential communication, the most effective relevance principles and understanding via relevance. In order to check the significance of the application of relevance theory to reading comprehension, the author chooses98students from the Law School of Inner Mongolia for Nationalities. The author conducts a comparative experiment between one class with traditional teaching method and another with input of relevance theory. Before experiment, the average English levels of these two classes are almost the same. Through the three stages of pre-test, training and post-test, the thesis comes to the conclusion that the optimal relevance theory can achieve enough contextual effects to be worth the reader’s attention. And the text put the readers to no gratuitous effort in achieving those contextual effects through the use of the optimal relevance theory.Finally, instructions and suggestions are presented in reading comprehension.