Teaching Higher Vocational College English Reading Within The Framework Of Relevance Theory

For many years, researchers from abroad and home have researched about Englishreading teaching from different perspectives. And Relevance Theory has beenintroduced to guide reading teaching. It is believed that reading activity is actually aninferential communicative activity in which readers have to seek for relevanceconstantly, while the readers ’ cognitive environment is very critical for them to seek forthe optimal relevance.In this thesis, the author investigated her own teaching and found there are someobstacles hamper the improvement of students’ reading ability. For instance, thelimitation of vocabulary, the lack of the background knowledge.In order to solve the problems above, the author designed this research, aiming atimproving the students’ reading comprehension. This thesis tries to answer thefollowing questions:1. Is it effective in improving the students’ reading comprehension by using relevancetheory in English teaching?2. What’s the attitude of the students toward the new teaching model?3.Are there any changes with the students’ reading strategies?In the research, the author chose the students who come from Foreign LanguageNormal School of Taiyuan University as participants. The research lasted for about16weeks and used some research methods like pre-test, post-test, interview andquestionnaire. Before the research, the author conducted a pre-test to ensure the twoclasses chosen have the similar level. Then the author used the relevance theory in theexperimental class during the reading teaching, and to the control class, the author usedthe traditional method. After the experiment, A post-test was conducted to test whetherthe relevance theory is effective in improving the reading comprehension. At last, theauthor used the SPSS16.0to analysis the data.Finally, according to the experiment analysis, the research achieves a conclusionthat the students in the experimental class improved much more than the students in thecontrol class. And the students’ interest in reading English material has also improved alot. In addition, it has been proved that the reading teaching method based on RelevanceTheory is helpful and meaningful to develop students’ inferential ability andimproving their reading comprehension.Of course, this study also has many deficiencies, for example, the amount of the participates are not enough, and the time of the research was short, either. We shouldpay attention to these aspects in the future.