Relevance Theory-Based English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

Reading is one of the most important skills of acquiring information and exchanging information for foreign language learners. Reading is a communication between the reader and the writer. It is a very complex psychological and cognitive process. When it comes to the foreign language teaching, the teaching of reading is supposed to be the most important content. The importance of reading has been acknowledged widely both at home and abroad. It is well known that students learn English and gain information mainly from the written language. And reading provides the most efficient and the most important channel of linguistic input. It develops the students’ linguistic competence and cultivates their communicative competence.However, in Senior high school, the traditional teaching method of reading is usually applied in English classroom activities, which mainly focuses on the explanation of words, phrases and grammar, which does not regard the passage as a whole, but only divides the whole passage into different individual parts. In many cases, this traditional method of reading teaching makes many students, especially the students whose English level is much lower, lose their interest in learning English. Thus, in this thesis, the author attempts to apply a new teaching method, that is a relevance-based approach, to check its effectiveness in improving the students proficiency in reading. Relevance theory, which is about human cognition, puts emphasis on communication and cognition, and provides a new approach to human communication from the cognitive perspective. According to the relevance theory, the process of communication is an ostensive-inferential process and human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance and every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance. Reading plays a critical role in human communication and it is a potential ability of communication for readers. Reading comprehension, a literary communication between authors and readers, should belong to ostensive-inferential communication. Therefore, relevance theory is justified in explaining reading comprehension. Based on this, the following hypothesis is proposed:the relevance-based approach to English reading teaching is superior to the traditional approaches. It can guide students’ reading strategies; activate the students’ interest and improve students’ reading ability. The significant implications and applications of this approach are clearer by contrasting it with other approaches. In this thesis the author attempts to probe into the new approach to reading teaching by conducting a teaching experiment in two parallel classes:an experimental class and a control class. The traditional reading teaching approach without the guidance of relevance theory was used in the control class and the relevance-based approach was used in teaching the experimental class. The teacher utilized relevance theory in directing the teaching strategies, choosing the appropriate materials for the students’ exercises and applied the relevance-based approach to the analysis of discourse and writing style and guided students to appropriately infer the writer’s intention by helping them construct relevant contextual assumptions so that they can achieve optimal relevance and successful comprehension. At the end of the experiment which has lasted for a semester, the English scores of the experimental class improved a lot compared with the control class, which further proved the hypothesis and the feasibility of the teaching suggestions.Therefore, this thesis reaches a conclusion that the relevance-based English reading teaching approach is superior to the traditional approaches. It can guide students’ reading strategies; activate the students’ interest and improve students’ reading ability.