THE CONTRIBUTION OF SPERBER-WILSON’S RELEVANCE THEORY ON ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF STUDENTS’ PERSUASIVE TEXT WRITINGS

Abstract

The study reported here is based on an investigation on the students’ writing. The
students were asked to compose tourism brochures as a kind of persuasive texts.
Data were collected from 25 students who were randomly divided into 3 groups
through a pre-test and a post-test. The data were then analyzed by using the
criteria of persuasiveness (Austin, 1962) in Relevance Theory. These criteria
include perlocutionary force, cognitive effects, advertising copy, rhetorical
expressions, and metaphor. Analyses show that, after the students are introduced
to criteria of persuasiveness, the quality of their persuasive text writing
improved. This improvement can be identified from the amplifying quality of
the criteria of persuasiveness in the students’ post-test writing. The study
concludes that even though the concept of Relevance Theory is based on the
philosophy of language and regarded as obtaining little practical adaptability to
the language-teaching context, language teaching profession could usefully have
made more use of this theory to examine teaching-learning process in the
classrooms.
Keywords: English, Language, Teaching, Persuasive Text, Writing