A Study On English Reading Teaching In Senior High School Based On The Relevance Theory

English is a required subject in Chinese high school, and from the perspective of the five English learning skills, reading is the basic skill of the other four. Traditional teaching model puts emphasis on the new words, language points and grammar, and the improvement of students’ English reading proficiency is neglected to a large degree. So many researchers are searching for a proper teaching model for the English reading teaching.In 1986, Sperber and Wilson proposed the Relevance Theory, and later it was widely studied in China. Some Chinese researchers have applied the Relevance Theory in the English teaching, but the studies of English reading teaching based on the Relevance Theory in senior high school are not adequate enough.Given the current situation of English reading teaching in senior high school, this study tries to testify the effect of the application of the Relevance Theory in English reading teaching. Three research questions are put forward as follows:1. Is the teaching model based on the Relevance Theory helpful to students’ English reading strategies?2. Is the teaching model based on the Relevance Theory more effective than the traditional teaching model in improving students’ English reading proficiency?3. What effect does the new teaching model have on reading proficiency of the students with different reading levels(high level, middle level and low level)?89 students from Lingyuan No. 3 senior high school are selected as the research subjects. One class is randomly chosen as control class(CC) and the other as experimental class(EC). The experiment lasts for 4 months. Before the teaching experiment, all the students of CC and EC receive a pre-questionnaire and a pre-test. After the experiment, the students of the two classes receive a post-test. The students of EC are required to fill in the post-questionnaire and 7 students of EC are interviewed. The results are collected and the data is analyzed by SPSS17.0. According to the data analysis, discussion and the interview, the research findings are listed as follows:1. This new teaching model based on the Relevance Theory is helpful to students’ English reading strategies, especially on predicting, contextualization, inferring and structure analysis.2. The new teaching model based on the Relevance Theory is more effective than the traditional teaching model in improving students’ English reading proficiency.3. The reading proficiency of the students in middle level and low level group are enhanced to a large extent, but as to the students in high level group, the improvement of reading proficiency is not as obvious as the other two groups.To sum up, the new teaching model on English reading comprehension is more effective than the traditional teaching model in improving students’ reading strategies and reading proficiency. Finally, some suggestions and implications are put forward for further research at the end of the thesis.