Relevance Theory And Listening Comprehension Of English News

English news, as a kind of authentic material with abundant information, is often chosen to be sources for some English courses, especially the listening course. But it is not so easy for English learners to comprehend English news. For teachers, it is also a bottleneck how to make the best of English news in the listening course. Therefore, it is of great practical significance to study listening comprehension of English news in order to improve students'listening abilities.This thesis attempts to study how to improve listening comprehension of English news by applying Relevance Theory to the listening course. Based on a brief review of Relevance Theory and an analysis of English news structure, four research questions are put forward in this thesis: 1) what are the common problems students have in English news listening? 2) whether the typical structure of English news contributes to students'construction of cognitive context; 3) whether finding the optimal relevance can help students to achieve a comprehensive understanding of news reports; 4) how to apply Relevance Theory to the practical teaching and learning of English news.These research questions have been tested in an empirical study which was carried out among 78 sophomores majoring in English at Nanjing College of Population Program Management with one questionnaire and two English news listening tests (the pre-test and the post-rest). The data were collected and then analyzed with SPSS 13.0. From the questionnaire it is learnt that most students are not competent in understanding English news because they are not clear about the typical structure of English news and the ways to find the optimal relevant information. The subsequent teaching experiment reveals that the "Inverted Pyramid" structure of English news embodies the basic cognitive process in our listening comprehension, from global to detail, from general to specific. A good application of Relevance Theory to the teaching of English news can help English learners sense the optimal relevance and construct the cognitive context, which leads to a better comprehension of English news. On the basis of these findings, some pedagogic suggestions are made for the teaching and learning of English news.