Relevance Theory And Its Application In Reading Comprehension

Reading is the one of the important ways of acquiring and exchanging information for foreign language learners. Reading is a communication between the writer and the reader and a very complex psychological and cognitive process carried out through printed letters by the reader and the writer. Although many studies have been carried out in this field in the past, few of them were relevance-based.This thesis makes an attempt to study reading comprehension by applying Relevance Theory proposed by Sperber & Wilson(1986/1995). To look at from a perspective of relevance, reading comprehension can be viewed as follows: 1) Due to differences of individuals' cognitive environments, the understandings of the same utterance could be different, which can explain why sometimes misunderstandings arise. 2) The author's real meanings very often are not in words on the page. The reader needs to construct meanings by making inferences. The aim of reading comprehension is to obtain the writer's intended meanings. 3) Reading comprehension is an inferential process in which the reader uses his encyclopedic, logical and lexical knowledge to process the incoming new information. 4) Different from the concept of context we are familiar with, context in RT is not given but a dynamic psychological construct. What is more, the selection of it is governed by the principle of relevance. 5) Optimal relevance is measured :in terms of effect, either derivation of contextual implication, or the confirmation or elimination of the already-held assumption. Meanwhile when processing the information, the readers' effort should be worthwhile and necessary. Hence how to search the optimal relevant information to form a context for inference within limited time is the key to improve the efficiency of reading comprehension.On top of the theoretical exploration of reading comprehension, the thesis also examines the ways of applying the theory to college English reading comprehension with the purpose of enhancing college English readers' reading ability.