An Empirical Study On The Application Of Relevance Theory To English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

For language learners,the importance of reading is self-evident.Especially for high school students who will attend the university entrance exam,its importance is becoming more and more obvious.Also,the New National Curriculum Standard points out that the students should develop their linguistic competence through the channel of input by reading and cultivate their communicative competence.However,the teachers still use the traditional teaching model which mainly focuses on linguistic knowledge,such as vocabulary and grammar,and neglects the cultivation of the students' reading proficiency at the present high school English reading teaching.Therefore,it is imperative to explore and apply an effective English reading teaching model for high school students.The author analyzes the nature and characteristics of reading comprehension.Also,the author expounds four important reading teaching models that have great effects on reading teaching.The author emphasizes its contributions and mentions its shortcomings as well.Therefore,the author tries to adopt a new kind of reading teaching method on the basis of relevance theory,aiming at improving students' reading proficiency and comprehensive ability of using English through reading.Relevance theory,which is put forward by Sperber and Wilson in the monograph Relevance: Communication and Cognition in 1986,provides a new approach to understand human communication from cognitive perspective.As a written communication activity,reading is an ostensive-inferential process involving information intention and communication intention from the perspective of relevance theory.With the help of their own previous logical information,encyclopedic information and linguistic information,readers deal with linguistic symbols that writers want to express.They make inference,seek optimal relevance and eventually communicate with the writer.The author tries to make an empirical study of the application of relevance theory to English reading teaching in senior high school and attempts to find answers to the following three questions:(1)Whether students' reading comprehension proficiency can be improved obviously with the RT-based reading teaching model?(2)Does the RT-based reading teaching model have similar effect on students in different reading levels(high,middle and low)in EC?(3)What changes have happened about students' attitudes toward reading comprehension after the teaching experiment in EC? Then the author conducts an empirical study which lasts for one semester.The subjects are 100 students of two parallel classes(one is experimental class and the other is control class)in Grade 2 from Gai Zhou No.2 Senior High School,Liaoning Province.Tests(pre-test and post-test)of reading comprehension for both control and experimental classes,questionnaires and interviews of reading strategies for experimentalclass are carried out in the experiment.The author analyzes and compares the results of tests with the software SPSS 19.0.Taking the analysis of reading tests and results of questionnaires and interviews into account,the author draws the following conclusions:(1)Students' reading comprehension proficiency can be improved obviously with the RT-based reading teaching model.(2)After using RT-based reading teaching model,students in middle and low reading levels have achieved more progress than students in high reading level.(3)After the teaching experiment,students in EC have more positive attitudes toward English reading comprehension.Above all,applying relevance theory into English reading teaching in senior high school has positive and practical significance.The author puts forward some specific pedagogical implications for English reading teaching on the basis of RT in senior high school.Meanwhile,the author points out the limitations of the research and suggestions for future study.