| In the age of information explosion, more and more people have not only realized the importance of reading, but also the significance of efficient reading. With the influence of information society, the newly revised College English Syllabus (2004) requires that college students have a relatively higher level of competence in English reading in order to meet the needs of academic research in the world in future. Meanwhile, the requirements of CET-4 on reading will also be improved to a higher level in 2006. Therefore, it is obvious that in modern society, college students should have higher reading ability in English.However, considering with the high requirements to college students, non-English majors'English reading competence is unsatisfactory. One of the reasons is that traditional English teaching mainly focuses on linguistic competence, such as vocabulary, sentence and grammar. As a result, students have a larger number of vocabulary and can make correct sentences; but their reading ability on the textual level is not developed effectively. According to the author's investigation of the freshmen of non-English majors, most of the problems they meet in reading are concerned with the global meaning or macro-structure of text.With the development of discourse analysis, English teachers draw some implication from the research that"the interpretation of sentences depends largely on the understanding and processing of a whole text."Therefore, the ability of reading comprehension of the whole text may be achieved under the direction of discourse.Among the theories of discourse, the theory of clause relation offers a general framework of common discourse patterns in English, which has important and practical significance in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teaching of reading. The paper is a study of the application of English discourse patterns to the teaching of non-English majors'reading.The thesis firstly introduces the clause relation and explains the three common...
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