The Application Of Relevance Theory To Senior High English Reading Teaching

Reading is an important way for people to get information.As far as language learning is concerned,reading is the basis of the other three skills.At the same time,English has gradually become a kind of language used by people from all over the world and the society has higher requirements for people's mastery of English.Therefore,reading teaching is regarded as one of the most important parts of English teaching.However,traditional English teaching has obvious disadvantage.In the traditional English teaching,teachers only pay attention to the transmission of reading knowledge and ignore the cultivation of students' reading ability.Therefore,it is urgent to find a new method.Sperber and Wilson firstly published their work Relevance: Communication and Cognition in 1986 and put forward Relevance Theory in it.And after that,the communicative cognition theory was studied in the field of linguistics.Relevance Theory holds that language communication is the ostensive-inference behavior,mainly including ostensive-inference communication,cognitive context and optimal relevance.The Relevance Theory gives people enlightenment to explore the human communication from the point of cognition.Based on Relevance Theory,the author holds the opinion that reading is a communication process between the readers and writers.Therefore,the author tries to apply Relevance Theory from the cognitive pragmatics to English reading teaching.This thesis intends to probe into the effectiveness of the reading teaching model guided by Relevance Theory in senior high English reading teaching.By doing the research,the author intends to answer the following three questions:(1)What effect does the teaching model guided by Relevance Theory have on students' reading attitude?(2)What influence does the teaching model guided by Relevance Theory have on students' awareness of the use of reading strategies in English reading?(3)What effect does the teaching model guided by Relevance Theory have on students' reading ability?First,this thesis reviews previous studies on the application of Relevance Theory to English reading teaching at home and abroad.Second,the related concepts of Relevance Theory are introduced.Then,in order to verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the reading teaching model guided by Relevance Theory,114 students of two classes in Grade One of Huaiyang NO.1 Senior High School are chosen as the research objects randomly to conduct an experiment by using three questionnaires(including Questionnaire A which is used twice and Questionnaire B),two tests and an interview.Before the experiment,the students need to take a pre-test,which aims at making sure that there is no significant difference in English reading level between the students in EC and CC.The teaching experiment lasts four months from September,2019 to December,2019,selecting Class 4 as experimental class(EC)and Class 3 as control class(CC)respectively.The reading teaching model guided by Relevance Theory is applied in Class 4(EC),while the traditional teaching method is adopted in Class 3(CC).After the teaching experiment,the author collects and analyzes the experimental data by SPSS20.0.The results show that the application of reading teaching model guided by Relevance Theory brings some changes to English reading teaching.First,the reading teaching model guided by Relevance Theory has changed students' negative attitudes towards English reading.Second,reading teaching model guided by Relevance Theory has raised students' awareness of the use of reading strategies during reading.Subsequently,the reading teaching model guided by Relevance Theory has improved students' reading ability,especially the deductive ability and summarizing ability.Finally,major findings and implication and limitation of this experimental research are put forward.