The Application Of Relevance Theory To The Teaching Of English Reading In Senior High School

In the modern society, with the globalization of the economic activities,communication becomes more and more important in our daily life. English plays an evenmore crucial role in communication. In senior high school, English is still seen as animportant subject. Reading is also vital in the language classroom because it is the mostimportant means of language input. Without enough understandable input at the right level,any learning simply cannot begin. In the New Curriculum Standard of Senior English,courses of senior high school should be adapted to the needs of students in cognitivecharacters and academic developments. The courses of senior high school should developstudents’ language ability for further development, and it should lay emphasis onimproving students’ abilities of obtaining information, processing information, analyzingand solving problems.Reading is a complex cognitive and psychological process, and it is also acommunication process between writer and reader. Writers express their intentions, plans,thinking and feelings in a written form. Readers can understand the writers’ true feelingsand intentions by recognizing, relating and inferring the language symbols, in this wayreaders can know the true information that hidden behind the writers.In recent years, compared with the New Standard of Senior High School, the students’English reading abilities are not so optimistic. The traditional English reading teachingmethod has dominated the reading class for a very long time in China. In a conventionalreading class in the senior high school, the teacher usually pays much attention to the newwords, language points and grammar and neglects the cultivation of English reading ability.Even though students have increased their quantities of vocabulary, and they can makegrammatical-content sentences, the efficiency of English reading is not improved.Recently, teachers have focused on the improvement of the students’ readingstrategies in senior high school teaching. More and more teachers hope to find out a propertheory that can be applied into the process of English reading teaching. The authoranalyzes the characters of reading comprehension and the nature of cognition. Meanwhile,the author introduces the four important English reading models that have great influenceon English reading teaching, and point out the defects of them as well. After that a newperspective of English reading teaching on the basis of relevance theory is examined.The thesis researches the application of relevance theory in English reading teaching in senior high schools. In order to prove whether RT has a positive effect on the Englishreading comprehension in senior high school students, the author hopes to find out theanswers to these three questions. The first question is can the RT-based teaching modelimprove senior high school students’ reading comprehension ability? The second questionis can students in three reading levels (high, middle, low) all improve their readingcomprehension ability obviously after the teaching experiment in EC? The third question iscan students’ attitudes towards English reading comprehension change after the teachingexperiment in EC?After the12-week teaching experiment, both EC and CC students are given a post-test.The data is collected and analyzed. The results showed that the two classes had obviousdifferences in reading comprehension level. Although both classes have someimprovements, the scores of EC students have obviously improved compared to that of theCC. That means relevance-theoretic reading teaching model can improve senior highschool students’ reading comprehension level. And at the same time this new teachingmodel can be proved to be more effective than the traditional teaching model in the presentstudy. In particular, the students in middle and low reading levels have achieved moreimprovements. In addition, the author also found that EC students had changed theirattitudes towards English reading comprehension. All the students became more positiveafter teaching experiment.In a word, the research showed that the relevance-theoretic reading teaching model ismore effective than the traditional models used in senior high school English teaching. Inanother word, the RT has some positive implications on the teaching of English reading insenior high school.