关联理论在初中英语阅读教学中应用地实证研究——以阿斯顿学校为例.pdf

Abstract Since Sperber and Wilson proposed the Relevance Theory (RT) in their book Relevance: Communication and Cognition in 1986, researchers began to explore the principle of human beings communication further from the cognitive perspective. Based on the key points of RT and previous studies (Tang, 2009), reading is considered as a communicative process between reader and writer; an optimal relevance – seeking process and an inference – making process on the basis of ostensive-inference. During the reading process, the reader tries to infer an implicature from an explicature based on his own cognitive environments. Different cognitive environments lead to different contextual assumptions. According to Sperber and Wilson, our physical environment may be the same. however, what they call our cognitive environment would be different for each of us. Every sentence the reader reads may add new information to the previous sentences, thus changing the interpretation. That is the way cognitive environments affect the reading comprehension. In order to find out whether RT has an positive effect on the teaching of English reading comprehension for junior middle school students, the writer proposed the following three research questions: First, can relevance-theoretic reading teaching model improve junior middle school students’ reading comprehension? Second, after the teaching treatment in EC, did students in three reading levels (high, middle and low) all improve their reading comprehension? Third, after the teaching treatment in EC, did students change their attitudes towards cognitive environment (linguistic knowled