Reading And Comprehension Of Est Discourse From The Perspective Of Psycholinguistics Comprehension Model

After long development of the study on discourse, the study of discourse comprehension has been influenced by cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics since 1970s. More and more psycholinguists become interested in the psychological process of discourse reading and comprehension since they have obtained fruitful achievements in the psychological study on lexical and sentences level. Meanwhile, nowadays, more and more attention is paid on the English for Specific Purpose (ESP) in the field of linguistics. The study on the texts of the ESP, such as law texts, media texts, political texts, has become an important branch of text linguistics. And it is a new trend to study the texts of the ESP from the point of view of psycholinguistics.This thesis is concerned about the reading comprehension process of EST texts from the angle of psycholinguistics. In this thesis, an important text comprehension model proposed by W. Kintsch and Van Dijk is introduced, in which they adopted a strategic comprehension process, including prepositional strategies, local coherence strategies, macro-strategies and schematic strategies, etc.. Such strategies form the three representative levels in discourse comprehension — surface structure, textbase and situation model, in which the strategies in macrostructures and the superstructures of EST texts are elaborated, with the hope that the initial study on psychological process of EST texts can help readers to understand and comprehend EST texts better and give some hints to the teaching of EST texts reading comprehension.