| For many years, College English Teaching (CET) in China is based on texts, English teachers cultivate students' language abilities by teaching texts. How to teach texts, to a great extent, determines or has strong impacts on the quality of CET. Some teachers adopt the "sentence-dominated method", laying more emphasis on the teaching at the sentence level. They pay great attention to the explanations of words' meanings and analyses of the grammatical structures of the sentences. Some teachers use the "discourse-dominated method", stressing the teaching at the discourse level. They concentrate on the analyses of the structure and main idea of the whole text. And there are some other teachers who synthesize these two methods and touch upon the teaching both at the sentence and discourse levels. However, according to the statistics and analyses of the results of College English Band Six of thirteen provinces, provided by the Test Center of National College English Test Band Four and Six Committee in 2001, college students still have problems both at the sentence and discourse levels. For instance, at the sentence level, some students are uncertain of which word is the most proper one and have failed to grasp some conventional collocations and grammatical rules; at the discourse level, some students have trouble in summarizing the main idea, inferring the writer's opinions and attitudes, distinguishing the styles of the writing and so on. Therefore, it is necessary for English teachers to open discussions and carry out studies on the approaches to CET, especially on the issue of how to help students solve the above problems and improve their language abilities by teaching texts.In light of this situation, the present author attempts to provide a multi-dimensional text-based (MDTB) approach to CET, centering round the issue of how to teach texts. According to the present problems of students and the aim of CET prescribed in College English Teaching Syllabus in 1999, that is, "to cultivate students' great abilities of reading and some abilities of listening, speaking, writingand translating, and make them able to communicate in English", the present author holds that English teachers should know and impart some theories of discourse analysis, stylistics and cognitive linguistics in their teaching, and teach texts both at the sentence and discourse levels, taking the improvement of students' reading abilities as a pivot and giving attention to the cultivation of other language abilities. The present paper, in the first place, has synthetically introduced some theories and implications of discourse analysis, stylistics and cognitive linguistics, which are valuable enough to offer guidance to the teaching of texts, and provided a theoretical framework for the MDTB approach. For example, in discourse analysis, theories about thematic structure and thematization, cohesion and coherence, discourse patterns and discourse types can generate direct guidance to the teaching of texts. Teachers may teach students how to understand difficult sentences by figuring out their themes and rhemes; how to comprehend and learn how to use cohesive devices; how to make predictions through the title of the text and find topic sentences to improve their understandings; or teach them to see the structure of the text by drawing a flowchart. In stylistics, the studies on stylistic features at the lexical and syntactic level, the figures of speech and register can throw lights on teaching students to appreciate stylistic features of words and sentences, figures of speech being used, and make students attach great importance to the appropriate use of different words and sentences in different contexts. And in cdgnitive linguistics, theories of prototype, knowledge structure (schema, frame and script), idealized cognitive models and cognitive models of discourse comprehension can deepen teachers' understandings of the cognitive processes and rules of how students learn and use languages, and help teachers design proper ways...
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