The Study On The Listening Comprehension Of Chinese EFL Learners From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

The ability of listening comprehension is an important skill of verbal communication and listening class is a required course in the current College English Teaching Syllabus in China. Up to now, studies on listening comprehension have been made from the following perspectives: the psycholinguistic perspective, the schema theory perspective and the pragmatic perspective. According to the core principles of Relevance Theory and the nature of listening comprehension process, this thesis reports a study of the listening comprehension under the framework of Relevance Theory. Relevance Theory is applied to explain listening comprehension process in details. From the viewpoint of Relevance Theory, the goal of listening comprehension, the inferential foundation of listening comprehension and the nature of it are all studied. In order to apply the theoretic analysis to EFL listening teaching practice, it is necessary to learn the characteristics of EFL learners'listening comprehension process. What are these characteristics? Therefore, based on the theoretic analysis, an empirical study is made to discover the characteristics of EFL learners. The author also attempts to explore the causes behind characteristics. The findings obtained from empirical study are quite valuable for EFL listening teaching and learning practice.