An Experimental Study On English Reading Teaching Based On Relevance Theory In Junior Middle School

People began to explore the human communication from the cognitive perspectivefurther since the Relevance Theory was proposed. Based on the Relevance Theory， theauthor believes that reading is communication between the readers and writers. During thereading process, readers try to infer the implicit meanings from the explicit meanings basedon their own cognitive environments to get the writers’ real intention. Readers always havedifferent cognitive environments, which lead to different contextual assumptions.Moreover, the phrases, which the readers are in touch with, will influence the informationthat the readers received before. Therefore, the readers’ reading abilities will make thecorresponding changes. The cognitive environments’ influencing on readingcomprehension is just through this way. According to the new curricular requirements,students are required to use the English language and cultural knowledge that they have gotin their minds to associate the literal meaning of the articles, grasp the purposes of thearticles and speculate the articles’ plots and the possible endings in the process of juniorhigh school students’ English reading training. Therefore, the author try to apply therelevance theory to the junior English reading teaching so as to help the students toimprove their reading abilities.The author proposes two questions to verify whether the relevance theory applies tothe junior English reading courses: the first question is that whether the relevance-theoryreading teaching mode can effectively improve the students’ junior English readingabilities? The second question is can the students’ attitudes toward English reading and thecognitive environment in process of English reading have positive changes inrelevance-theory reading teaching mode?In the experiment, the author selects two classes from the junior department ofJinzhou English training school as test samples, and carries out a three-month experimentalteaching. Before the experiment, the author divides the two classes as the experimentalgroup and the control group, and chooses English reading test questions that are for highschool entrance exams to test them to confirm that the overall reading levels of these twogroups are the same. After that, for the experimental group, the author makes aquestionnaire in order to ascertain their attitudes toward the cognitive environment. Afterfinishing various preparatory works to the experiment, the author starts a three-monthreading teaching experiment based on the relevance theory. After the experiment, other testfor the high school entrance exam is to test the two groups, and then, a questionnaire made to investigate the experimental group. In the end, the author collects the data of those twotests of both groups and that of the two questionnaires only for the experimental groupafter the experiment, and applies the software SPSS to analyze.The results show that: firstly, the application of the relevance-theory English readingteaching mode has a positive effect on improving the junior school student reading abilities;secondly, the students’ attitudes toward English reading and the cognitive environment,including background knowledge, language knowledge, reading strategies, etc. havepositive changes after experiencing the relevance-theory reading teaching mode in processof English reading. In conclusion, the relevance-theory reading teaching mode has a certaineffect on the junior English reading teaching. However, the author also realizes somelimitations of this mode, which will discuss in the last of this paper.There are five chapters in this thesis. The first chapter is an introduction of thebackground, significance and the purpose of the research. The second chapter is theliterature review of the relative foregoing researches about this research. The third chapteris on the research Methodology. The fourth chapter discusses the results and data analysisof the experiment. Moreover, the fifth chapter is about the conclusion of this research thatconstitutes the introduction of the major findings of this research, the implication andsuggestions to teachers and the students, and the limitations of this research.