An Experimental Study On The Application Of Pragmatic Inference To The Teaching Of Higher Vocational English Reading

Reading is a very complex psychological and cognitive process. It is one ofthe most important means for the language learners to acquire and communicateinformation. Reading teaching is always the main content of English teaching.Reading can support the most effective and important language input. Thusreading can improve the students’ language competency and make them applylanguage in communication. At present, some scholars have tried to adopt somereading teaching methods, but restricted with the English foundation level of thehigher vocational students, most of the teaching performances are based on theexplanations of words and grammar and they also do some exercises about them.This reading teaching method makes many students feel uninterested in Englishlearning. So in this paper, the author adopts a new reading teaching method.Applying the pragmatic inference to direct the reading teaching is the new readingteaching method. It makes the students think actively. The intention of this paper isto survey whether the new reading teaching method can improve the students’English reading proficiency.This paper takes Relevance Theory as the theoretical basis.80students fromSchool of Tourism and Hospitality Management in Shenyang Normal Universityare taken as subjects. They are from two classes. One is the experimental class,and the other one is the control class. The two classes are taught in differentreading teaching methods in15weeks as the experimental teaching. There are twodifferent questionnaires for the experimental class before and after theexperimental teaching. They can indicate the students’ different English reading interest, habit and motivation.etc. There are two different reading comprehensiontests for both of the experimental class and control class before and after theexperimental teaching. They can indicate the reading proficiency of the twoclasses before and after the experimental teaching. And then, all the data, beforeand after the experiment teaching, is analyzed by SPSS (17.0). In order toexplicitly check whether the remarkable improvement of reading proficiency ofexperimental class is correlated with the cultivation of pragmatic inference ability,this research adds an other reading test for the experimental class and analyzes thedata by E-Prime experiment software.There are four research questions in this paper. they are:1) Is the readingteaching method with pragmatic inference superior to the traditional one?2) Is theimprovement of reading proficiency correlated with the training of pragmaticinference?3) Can the students accept this new reading teaching method, and adoptsome of the skills of it while reading?4) Can the new reading teaching methodincrease the students’ interest of the independent of English reading study?The research work has brought about discoveries as follow:1) The students’reading proficiency in experimental class is improved remarkably than that ofcontrol class.2) The students’ reading proficiency can be improved by cultivatingthe student’s pragmatic inference ability. They are the positive correlation.3) Thestudents can adopt the new teaching method, and apply some of the skills whilereading.4) The students feel interested in learning English gradually and theirlearning independent is increased.This research has explored the practical significance of pragmatic inferencedirecting higher vocational reading teaching. This can help the teachers realize thecrucial reasons of reading teaching and then find a more effective teaching method.Meanwhile, according to the students’ situation of higher vocational college atpresent, it is necessary to optimize the reading teaching model and improve thestudents’ reading proficiency.