V. Implications to Teaching of English Reading 17

5.1 Familiarizing Students with Writing Strategies 17

5.2 Developing Students’ Inferential Abilities 17

5.3 Increasing Students’ Background Knowledge Input 18

Ⅵ. Conclusion 20

Bibliography 21

English Reading Comprehension Process under the Guidance of Relevance Theory

I. Introduction 

    Reading comprehension is considered as an important part in English learning. English teachers have done a lot in explaining the knowledge points in reading passages, and the students have to make great effort to learn the knowledge points. However, the result of the learning and teaching of English reading comprehension is not quite optimistic in spite of the large amount of time devoted to it. 

    Relevance theory is a cognitive theory put forward by Dan Sperber and Deindre Wilson(1986) on language communication. In recent years, it has been widely applied to guide the learning and teaching process of English reading comprehension. However, not many people have focused on exploring the factors that affect the process of English reading comprehension or interpreting the process of English reading from perspective of relevance theory.

    The thesis, combining the related achievement in recent years and analyzing the essential process of the reading comprehension, is designed to offer a detailed explanation of the English reading comprehension process under the guidance of relevance theory. Meanwhile, it also aims to provide some implications to improve the teaching of reading comprehension. It is hoped that relevance theory could be applied widely in teaching of English reading and the students’ reading proficiency could be effectively improved. 

This thesis consists of six parts. Part one gives a general introduction to the aim, significance of the study and the organization of the thesis. Part two reviews the present situation of teaching of English reading in China and also researches on English reading comprehension in recent years. Part three elaborates the theoretical framework of the thesis: relevance theory, including its basic concepts and main points. Part four, the key part of the thesis, concentrates on and analyzes the English reading comprehension process based on relevance theory. It firstly presents the feasibility of applying relevance theory to English reading comprehension, followed by interpretation of English reading comprehension process under the guidance of relevance theory. Part five provides the implications to teaching of English reading. And finally Part six provides a major conclusion, mainly including the findings, limitations of the present research and several suggestions for the future study.    源[自-吹冰*`论/文'网·www.chuibin.com/

II. Literature Review   

    This chapter reviews the present situation of teaching of English reading and also the researches on English reading comprehension both at home and abroad. 

2.1 The Present Situation of the Teaching of English Reading 

    Reading comprehension plays a key role in the cultivation of the five fundamental skills in a foreign language. It is not only the aim of second language acquisition but also an important way in second language acquisition. By dealing with a large number of reading materials, the learners could acquire the related language knowledge, enhance the language intuition and also improve their language consciousness. 

According to Ding Yanren (2008), most of Chinese learners improve their English through reading rather than dialogue practice. Ding thinks that the aim of learning a second foreign language is to speak, write, and especially to read with the targeted foreign language. It could be drawn from the views of Ding Yanren(2008) that reading comprehension is of a special significance in English learning. However, to most of Chinese students, reading comprehension is a challenging skill in their language learning. A large proportion of them perform very poorly in the reading comprehension in their examinations. What is the reason for that? Perhaps it is because the students, especially their teachers lack scientific understanding of the essence of reading comprehension process. Without a scientific understanding, both the teachers and the students tend to consider reading comprehension as a simple process of decoding reading passages. As a result, the students fail to cultivate their cognitive abilities and improve their reading since the teachers usually apply traditional teaching methods in English reading class. In brief, it is the improper way of teaching and learning that produces the negative effects.