The Application Of The Inference And Context Of Relevance Theory In Middle School English Listening Teaching

This thesis explores the listening teaching in middle schools in China on the basis of the interpretation of the Standards for English Course in Full-Time Compulsory Education &Common Senior Middle Schools (experimental Version, 2002). The Curriculum Standards sets 9 grades of capacity of teaching aims, putting forth a much higher requirement than any of the previous syllabuses in using English for real communication. According to the rules of the students'cognitive development, the curriculum standards strengthened the students'capacity of integrated language using, that is"to get the gist and theme","to define the event's development order or logical relationship","to predict","to understand the speaker's intention and attitude","to evaluate the listening content","to understand the discourse's deeper meaning".Listening is an essential component of communication and a rather difficult language skill to acquire. For most students, listening is by far the most important of the four language learning skills.This thesis tries to explain the nature of English listening comprehension from the psycholinguistic perspective and a Schema-theoretical perspective. Then the most important, try to explain it from the Relevance-theoretical perspective.Relevance:Communication and Cognition (1986) is written by Sperber and Wilson, which is an approach to communication and utterance understanding based on a general view of cognition. It draws central attention to the role of the contextual inference and provides the powerful account for the nature of context from the dynamic point of view. However, Relevance and the subsequent comments have only to do with the abstract theory itself, and it is"not clear how it could be made to have empirical application"to teaching. Though there are many theses on Relevance Theory, most of these studies on the college English listening teaching, fewer on the middle school classroom listening teaching. Such being the case, I choose The...