A Study On The Application Of Relevance Theory In English Majors’ Listening Comprehension

As the important skill in daily communicative activities, listening is the major approach to communicating and obtaining information. Traditional studies on listening comprehension involve many aspects, but fail to explain its inference process. From the perspective of cognitive pragmatics, this thesis explores the process of listening comprehension of second language learners under the framework of relevance theory. The research questions to be addressed in this study include:(1) Can the background knowledge stimulate the relevance awareness of English majors? And can the inference of context help improve the degree of comprehension?(2) Is the inference of speaker’s intention obviously helpful to listening comprehension of English majors?(3) Can the English majors apply automatically the relevance principle during the process of listening comprehension?. By answering the above questions, this study aims to explore effective methods to improve L2learners’listening abilities and provide implications and suggestions for the teaching of listening.60college sophomores majoring in English are chosen as the subjects of this study. A questionnaire and an interview are adopted as research instruments. The former consists of14questions and the latter includes8questions. The content of questions is related to the three research questions. The two kinds of research tools are the main source of collecting data. After the completion of the questionnaires, three participants are selected randomly from60subjects for in-depth interview.The results of the research show that:(1) Relevant background knowledge could stimulate the subjects’ awareness of relevance. However, even for the English majors, only few high-proficiency students could make inference during the listening process. Most students often make inference about the whole discourse after listening.(2) The inference of speaker’s intention mainly happens when the listening material is about the conversation between two persons, which is helpful for the listening comprehension. There is less inference during listening when the listening material is of other styles.(3) Only few high-proficiency learners could use the relevant strategies automatically during listening. For low-proficiency learners, the relevant strategies are only used when the listening material is relatively simple.The findings of study have some implications for language learning, teaching and researching. First of all, the learning of a foreign culture should be reinforced during the language study, which should not be limited to the listening class. Secondly, the influence of linguistic knowledge accumulation and the practice of inference ability should not be ignored. Teachers should attach importance to building up relaxed learning environment to help students acquire more linguistic knowledge and train the inference ability more effectively. At last, some pre-listening activities should be organized and multimedia teaching tools should also be used frequently. For instance, multimedia teaching could arouse the relevance awareness combined with the sense of sight, and will help listeners comprehend the language and culture more correctly and quickly.