A Study Of English Reading Teaching At College Level From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Reading is of great significance for foreign language learners to acquire and exchange information. It is communication between the reader and the writer through printed words. As we know now, reading is a very complicated psychological and cognitive process in which the writer expressed his thinking and feelings in a written form while the reader attempts to comprehend his actual meaning with recognition, relevance and inference.Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory is the soil on which cognitive context prospers so the author first explains some basic concepts such as relevance, optimal relevance, etc. According to RT, reading is a process of seeking optimal relevance and an ostensive-inferential process. The thesis then discusses implicature and inference, the principle of relevance and the relation between relevance and reading comprehension. The author believes the theory might shed new light on English reading teaching.To prove whether RT is effective in improving college students’reading proficiency, the author carried out some experiments to verify the relationship between seeking for optimal relevance and reading comprehension. She first employed a questionnaire survey among 77 non-English majors. Then she designed two tests, a pre-test and a post-test for two classes of students. One class acted as an experimental group while the other served as control group. The experimental group received some training to cultivate their consciousness of relevant thinking while the control class received no such instruction during about half a year. The author also gave some practical suggestions accordingly for teachers to improve their teaching. In summary, teachers should cultivate students’abilities to seek for optimal relevance, the abilities to infer to improve the students’reading comprehension abilities.