Application Of Clause Relation Model To The Teaching Of English Reading In Higher Vocational Institute

As reading is one of the important skills which language learners are supposed to acquire, it has been the core of the research of foreign language teaching in recent years. And the research into theoretical models of reading comprehension and reading strategies and techniques has been one of the focuses of foreign language teaching research field. The major popular reading models currently used in secondary vocational school include top-down and bottom-up models, interactive model and schema theory. All of them have been used in higher vocational institute for a long time and their own characteristics respectively. They have made great contribution to the improvement of English reading teaching in higher vocational institute. However, these four models are not ideal for the English reading teaching of higher vocational institute. The reading teaching of higher vocational institute has its own characteristics. Consequently, it is necessary to search out a model which is feasible and appropriate for the teaching of reading of higher vocational institute. Students of higher vocational institute are a special group and different from college students. And they have characteristics of their own. They have poor discourse competence, and they just gain broken information after reading a text and can not inextenso understand what they are reading. This may attributes to their poor basic skills of language. At the same time, the way they do their reading is also problematic.This paper attempts to conduct English reading teaching from a new perspective—employing clause relation model in the reading teaching of higher vocational institute so as to improve student's reading competence. Clause relation model may have been used in the English reading teaching in universities and colleges, but it is a new attempt to introduce clause relation model in the reading teaching in class in higher vocational institute, where top-down and bottom-up models, interactive model and schema theory are popular. And the author hopes that clause relation model can make up students' poor discourse competence and can teach students learn to grasp the clues of a discourse and accordingly grasp the main idea of the text and then they can fully comprehend the text. To test whether the clause relation model can improve the reading ability of students in higher vocational institute, the author did a teaching experiment. And the result of the teaching experiment proves this model is practical and efficient in the view of teaching English reading in higher vocational institute, and it can improve students' reading ability.The author briefs the rationale and purpose and significance of this study in Chapter One. The emphasis of Chapter Two is firstly given to literature review of this paper. And then four major popular reading teaching models currently used in higher vocational institute are briefly analyzed, including the defects of these models. Lastly, signaling devices and clause relation patterns are analyzed and tentatively introduced into the English reading teaching of English major in higher vocational institute as a reading teaching model. Signaling devices mainly cover connectives in discourse outlined by Halliday & Hasan—which can signal four kinds of semantic relations, and lexical items of vocabulary 3 in discourse advanced by Winter (1977) & Hoey (1983)—which can also signal clause relations. And clause relation patterns mainly involve the discussion of three common patterns in discourse—problem-solution pattern, hypothetical-real pattern and general-particular pattern. Helping students to get a good command of these cohesive devices, including the clause relation patterns signaled by these devices will help improve students' reading comprehension competence. Chapter Three and Chapter Four are the focus of this paper. In chapter Three, clause relation model is first briefed and the methodology of this model is stated. The teaching experiment was carried out among students of Grade Five of English major in Feixi Teachers' School to test whether clause relation model could be effectively and successfully used in English reading teaching in higher vocational institute. The instruction in clause relation signals and clause relation patterns is emphasized. Through pre- questionnaire and one test paper, the subjects' learning situation and method are obtained. In order to learn whether the model contributes to improvement of subjects' reading competence, the tests are conducted before and after the teaching experiment respectively to verify the significance between the experimental class and the control class. In Chapter Four, data are collected and then analyzed. CS10.31 was used to analyze the experimental results and t-test was employed to test whether the results drawn from the teaching experiment are scientific and significant. Finally a conclusion of research is drawn. Chapter Five ends the study with the conclusion that the clause relation model for reading teaching is of great help to the improvement of students' ability to read and can cultivate students' ability to get both micro and macro analysis of a discourse so as to achieve the aim of reading.