In Search Of Relevance: A Case Study On Improving English Listening Comprehension Of Senior High School Students

English listening class is an important component of foreign language teaching. The teaching quality of listening class will directly affect students' reception of language knowledge. Although our traditional model of listening teaching has revealed itself as quite inadequate and inappropriate, theoretical studies on improving English listening teaching are scare and scant. Therefore, the present paper attempts to explore the possibility of applying relevance theory to senior high school English listening class. To be more specific, students are encouraged to search for the relevance of conversation in their practice in improving their English listening comprehension. For the purpose of the present study 100 students from grade two of No.10 Middle School of Xiamen are to finish a questionnaire. Students show their attitudes and difficulties of English listening comprehension. In order to know whether relevance theory can help students improve their listening abilities, the writer of this paper designed a pretest and a posttest. The experimental group received the guide of relevance theory while the control group was taught with traditional methods. After 8 months, the result of the post-test showed that the listening comprehension of the experimental group was greatly improved. Although the present experiment is but a tentative one, its results are quite encouraging and thus may pave the way for further studies with relevance theory put into practice in our English listening teaching.