A Study Of Listening Comprehension From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Listening comprehension plays a key role not only in daily communication, but in language learning as well. The importance of listening comprehension makes it become the research object of many disciplines. Scholars have studied listening comprehension from the psycholinguistic perspective, cognitive perspective, second language acquisition perspective and pragmatic perspective. Although these researches have had important influence on English listening teaching, the limitations of these studies are also existed.Sperber and Wilson put forward Relevance Theory in their work Relevance:Communication and Cognition. And the emergence of Relevance Theory creates a new perspective for listening comprehension research. Relevance Theory gives an account of communication and utterance interpretation from the view of cognition and pragmatics. And listening comprehension is an important respect of communication and utterance interpretation. This thesis is an attempt to account for English listening comprehension within the framework of Relevance Theory, and to draw some effective implications for the teaching and learning of English listening. In this way, it can help to achieve the purpose of improving the English listening teaching and the students’ listening comprehension abilities.The present paper will make an introduction of the important notions ofRelevance Theory, namely ostensive-inferential model, cognitive context, relevance,optimal relevance, and it will also give an analysis and explanation of their roles in the listening comprehension. Relevance Theory holds that human communication is governed by relevance principle. And according to this principle, listening comprehension should be optimal relevance oriented. Relevance Theory asserts dynamic context theory and it argues that in the process of communication, the context needed to be activated in utterance interpretation is dynamic. In listening comprehension, the elimination and construction of assumptions result in the updating of context, which embodies the dynamic context. Relevance Theory regards utterance interpretation as an ostensive-inferential process. The speaker produces an ostensive stimulus with optimal relevance in the form of utterance, while the hearer interprets the utterance through pragmatic inference. During the process of listening comprehension,the listener immediately activates relevant information after receiving the stimulus, and then carries on inferring so as to achieve the communicative intention of the speaker.According to the relevance-theoretic analysis of listening comprehension, the paper puts forward some implications for listening teaching and learning: English teachers should inspire the students to construct the relevant chain, use the cognitive context in teaching, and select the listening materials with relevance; Students should accumulate abundant background knowledge of English speaking countries and lexical knowledge,and take advantage of relevant information to improve their listening forecasting ability.Finally, the author makes a brief conclusion of the present study. She points out the limitations existing in this study, as well as puts forward some suggestions on the further related researches.