Relevance Theory And The Teaching Of English Listening

This thesis centers on the application of relevance theory to the teaching of English listening. In view of the primacy of listening comprehension ability and current misunderstanding of listening existing in Chinese teaching, this thesis attempts to study the listening in terms of relevance theory in order to help the teacher realize the crux in the teaching of English listening and work out effective teaching strategies to improve Chinese students' listening comprehension.The thesis proceeds from the realities of the teaching of English listening in China. After a brief analysis of former scholar's studies on listening comprehension as well as their respective influence, relevance theory is introduced with an aim to make up for the shortcomings of previous studies and bring into full play of its advantage in the teaching of English listening.In virtue of its novel insight into the essence of listening communication and the interpretation of theory, the role of relevance theory in the teaching of listening comes to the surface. Besides, this thesis gives a detailed account about how to use the relevance theory to choose the suitable listening materials, how to seek relevance while listening, how to improve learners' relevance sensibility and interest, and how to design the teaching strategies of listening lesson. Great effort is made to account for how to employ relevance theory to guide every step in the teaching of listening lesson. In this process, an attentive sample of teaching plan is presented in order to further explain the positive guiding function of relevance theory in the teaching of English listening.The thesis comes to an end with a comprehensive survey of the application of relevance theory to the teaching strategies of listening and a brief glimpse of the existing problems in the present research, as well as some suggestions on the further related researches.