On College English Reading Teaching From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

With the development of society, English becomes the world nowadaysinternational social intercourse language. A growing number of people start to useEnglish, acquire and exchange information from outside world. English readingcomprehension, as an important part of English teaching, is also a way to reflect thepotential English communicative ability of the readers. The reading process associatesboth writers and readers concerned for two purposes. One is the writer expresses hisintentions, thinking and feelings in a written form, while the other is the readerunderstands the writer’s information conveyed in his writings via recognition,relevance and inference, etc. Since this kind of communication is not a face-to-faceprocess, it is necessary for a reader to have a good command of English languagereading skills, for it is an essential guarantee of effective communication in writtenform. In order to improve the abilities of English readers, or rather, English learners, itis a good idea to apply Relevance Theory to English reading teaching.For many years more attention has been given to the improvement of students’reading comprehension, and many English teachers have mainly focused on the words,sentences, paragraphs and passages, training their students with various reading skills,but fails to give enough attention to the perspective of Relevance Theory in theirreading teaching, which can’t be considered as critical important, but at leastindispensible to the improvement of the ability of the learners’ reading comprehension.And this thesis intends to discuss and analyze the cognitive nature of reading as wellas to introduce three models. Finally, it points out the limitations of the three models.Therefore，a more efficient and comprehensive reading model is needed to guideEnglish reading comprehension both in learning and teaching.Relevance Theory has been widely discussed in the field of linguistics based on Sperber and Wilson’s publication of their famous work Relevance: Communicationand Cognition in1986. The theory mainly deals with the communication betweenhearer and speaker in oral form. According to nature of reading, it also belongs to thecategory of communication. This communication, instead of taking place between thespeaker and the hearer occurs between the writer and the reader. However, the essenceis the same, except that the former is completed through sound system while the lattervia sight mechanism. Relevance Theory has been applied to many kinds of fields,such as literature, linguistics and psychology, etc. However, there is not much workdone on exploring English reading comprehension process from the respective ofRelevance Theory, especially for Chinese language learners in college and university.From the perspective of Relevance Theory, the thesis regards English readingprocess as an ostensive-inferential making process, a process of seeking optimalrelevance and a process of selecting context. Therefore, teachers should place anemphasis on cultivating students’ awareness of dynamic context and the ability ofinference and the ability of seeking optimal relevance. Because of the lack ofscientific information about the nature of reading, many misunderstandings exist inthis field. If we can apply Relevance Theory to reading process， themisunderstandings of comprehension may be solved.The several important points of the Relevance Theory will be illustrated in thisthesis, and then this paper tries to find out the efficient solution to apply these pointsto reading comprehension process, and finally works out several inplications forcollege English teachers. At the end of the thesis, the author points out the limitationsof this study, the problems appeared in the research as well as suggestions for furtherstudies, hoping this study will offer some useful suggestions for both teachers andstudents.