Improving The Teaching Efficiency Of English Reading For Students In Senior Middle School

Reading is a psychological process of acquiring information from the written language. The teaching of English reading is an important part of English teaching; meanwhile, it is also a difficult part for students to improve. Traditional teaching courses are taught on the level of words, grammar and syntactic analysis, and the use of the theories of text analysis is always neglected. Text Analysis is a linguistic analysis of text. Text analysis itself is not a teaching approach, but a means of describing how language is used in communication. Therefore, how to apply the theories of text analysis in the language classroom to serving the teaching of foreign languages has become a topic concerned by many scholars and foreign language teachers. Theoretically, we readers should analyze and apply some theoretical knowledge to help clear away the barriers in reading, and improve our reading speed. There exist close relationships between reading and the culture of the target language, one's background knowledge, one's experiences and the context. In order to improve the teaching of reading, this paper sets out to analyze the nature of reading, text properties, context and schematic knowledge, and to discuss how to train the language learners (i.e. students) to acquire "discourse competence" and improve their comprehension by applying the theories of text to reading courses.Apart from the parts of Introduction and Conclusion, this paper has another four chapters.Chapter 2 discusses the essentials of reading, the definitions of reading existing in the minds of different people, and analyzes their advantages and disadvantages, thus the author select one definition which is appropriate to this thesis: Reading is a psychological process of acquiring information from the written language. It involves thinking with regard to the understanding of what one reads, not only the surface meaning of words and sentences, but also the implied meaning and the relationships between sentences in the context. Then the author discusses the traditional teaching procedure of English reading courses and the problems existing in it: on the one hand, most of the teachers still apply the traditional teaching methods while teaching reading,by asking students preview the text and explaining some difficult words and sentence structures; on the other hand, most of the teachers do not really know what the students wish to acquire through reading. What they really wish to get is reading skills. Then the reasons of teaching English reading for students' in senior middle school and the psychological view of reading process and the roles students play in reading are discussed in the following sections.Chapter 3 is devoted to an observation of text analysis. It is the largest language unit for human communication. There are some text consensus: coherence and cohesion, sequentiality and completeness. Then the author presents us three levels of reading, i.e. literal level, interpretive level and critical level. It also discusses the application of Text Analysis to the teaching of reading.Chapter 4 provides a general study of the relationship between context and reading. Context refers to the situation in which language activity takes place in a certain time and place. Language is used for human communication and it should have situational factors such as participants, topic, time and place, etc. Word meaning, sentence meaning and textual meaning all depend on context. Then the strategy of solving the difficulties in reading by contextualization and the enlightenment of context on the teaching of reading is presented before the readers.Chapter 5 gives a brief account of schema theory and a detailed study of how schema functioning in reading and how content schema operating in texts, and helps to make expectations and inferences. Briefly speaking, schema theory is the background knowledge about the formal, rhetorical, organizational structures of different kinds of texts. If one has enough experience and background knowledge, he/she w...