A Study On The Teaching Of English Listening Based On Relevance Theory

The teaching of English listening in China mainly emphasizes the outcome of listening comprehension:the correctness of the students’ answers. Teachers provide less guidance to the actual teaching process. As a result, students participate in the listening activities passively, and listening skills and strategies, such as prediction and inference, are neglected to some extent. In this case, the teaching process of listening comprehension should be optimized. This thesis presents a teaching approach of listening comprehension based on Relevance Theory, which aims to improve students’listening comprehension ability. Two teaching samples are used to demonstrate the actual teaching process based on the theory. An experiment is conducted to testify the effectiveness of the teaching approach.Based on the relevant notions and principles of Relevant Theory, the interrelation of listening and Relevance Theory is analyzed. According to this theory, listening comprehension process is viewed as an ostensive-inferential process in which speakers provide the ostensive stimulus including informative intention and communicative intention, listeners seek the optimal relevance based on the stimulus and infer the communicative intention of speakers. Several assumptions are formed, and these assumptions change constantly within the dynamic contexts. The contextual assumptions which are produced in mutual cognitive environments signify the success of listening comprehension.An experiment which lasts14weeks is conducted involving an EC (experimental class) and a CC (control class) that are taught by the same teacher with two different teaching approaches. The author presents two teaching samples in the EC to demonstrate the listening process from the perspective of Relevance Theory. The teaching process based on Relevance Theory focuses on students’predicting and inferential abilities in listening comprehension process. Students construct reasonable contexts according to the input utterances; seek the optimal relevance in utterances to find out speakers’real intention. The teaching activities are designed by the author to help listeners’cultivate good learning habits and improve their listening skills and strategies. Students are encouraged to participate in the listening activities actively in a relative relaxing environment. All the subjects in the experiment come from Hunan Industrial Polytechnic and they must take part in the pre-test and post-test. The questionnaire aims to know students’attitudes, habits and expectations related to the listening comprehension and the teaching of listening. All the statistics of the tests are analyzed by SPSS19.0. Through careful comparison and analysis of the statistics, we can find that the students from the EC have made greater progress than the students from the CC after14weeks’training. We can conclude that the teaching approach based on Relevance Theory is effective in improving students’listening comprehension abilities. Students’interest is motivated and their predicting and inferential abilities are cultivated and strengthened in the teaching process of listening comprehension. The possibility of applying Relevance Theory to the teaching process of listening comprehension is also discussed according to the two interviews with students and teachers respectively.Based on the major findings of the thesis, the teaching process based on Relevance Theory is reasonable and effective. This thesis is expected to provide some implications and suggestions for further teaching and studies in this field.