Application And Study Of Relevance Theory In College English Vocabulary Teaching

Vocabulary is the key element of English learning, and vocabulary teaching is the most essential and most important part of English teaching. One can not apply this language flexibly without adequate vocabulary size. According to the newly published College English Curriculum Teaching Requirement(2007), more emphasis was given to college English teaching and students’ vocabulary level. It is difficult to meet what College English Curriculum Teaching Requirement requires, especially for non-English majors. For them, it is a long-term task to find a suitable approach to grasp vocabulary. Although college teachers and students have spent large amount of time and energy on vocabulary learning, and some teachers even have applied different kinds of theories suitable to vocabulary teaching, students haven’t made remarkable progress in vocabulary learning yet. Finding out an appropriate and efficient method to help students learn vocabulary is a vital task for English teachers.In recent years, the birth of Relevance Theory, a theory based on cognitive and communication has brought the most significant monograph in pragmatics. It was born in 1980 s and was put forward by the French linguist Dan Sperber and the British linguist Deirdre Wilson in their co-work Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Relevance Theory includes two relevance principles. The first principle is called cognitive principle of relevance: human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance. The second principle is communicative principle: each act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance. Besides, Relevance Theory put forward the famous ostensive-inferential model. Ostensive act and inferential act are two aspects of communication. From the speaker’s side, communication should be seen as an act of making one’s intention clear. This act is called ostensive act. On the contrary, from the hearer’s side, communication is a process of inferring, to infer the speaker’s intention. The theory has been applied into discourse analysis frequently while less in vocabulary teaching.Obviously, teaching and learning is a process of communication and cognition. This thesis is based on relevance theory put forward by Sperber, D. and Wilson, D aiming to expose its guiding position in college English teaching in China.This thesis explains the importance of vocabulary teaching and contents firstly, and shows the value of Relevance Theory applied in college English teaching. The second part is theoretical foundations. It introduces the development and contents of Relevance Theory in detail, and explains the link points between RT(relevance theory) and vocabulary teaching. And then the current situation of vocabulary teaching research is referred in the third part. The fourth part is teaching experiment which introduces the teaching procedures under guide of RT at length. The teacher chooses two classes of the sophomores majoring in preschool education in GuiZhou Normal College, 124 students in total. The experimental class is learning vocabulary under the guide of RT and the control class is under traditional teaching methods. After 16 weeks of teaching, compared the data between two classes, the author arrives at conclusion that experimental class does better in vocabulary learning than control class. The last part is conclusion for those basic views above. And the author makes suggestions and presents limits in this part.