The Enhancement Of Students' Proofreading Performance In NMET Through Discourse-Analysis Teaching In Reading Class

According to The New Criteria of Senior English for Chinese Students, English language teaching aims at fostering the students' comprehensive English ability to use it. In order to objectively evaluate this ability, proofreading, a comprehensive test item with rather high validity in recent years, is very workable and effective. However, most students reckon that proofreading is the most difficult item to handle in the examination and lose a lot of marks in it. The failure in proofreading is mainly due to lack of discourse knowledge. Therefore, it becomes the title of this thesis "The Enhancement of Students' Proofreading Performance in NMET through Discourse-Analysis Teaching in Reading Class". It is hoped that this study will catch the high school English teachers' attentions to the importance of discourse analysis, helping them shift from the sentence-oriented approach to the discourse-oriented approach so as to "enhance" the students' comprehensive language competence.To attain its goal, this thesis, outlines first of all related theories about discourse, together with the characteristics of proofreading and its theoretical bases, etc. and it can test not only grammar and vocabulary in the light of discourse context, but also many other points at discourse level. Then by analyzing existing problems in proofreading, the paper emphasizes the importance of discourse analysis in English reading teaching.It then discusses how to apply the theory of discourse analysis to high school English teaching details with special reference to such things as cohesion and coherence, context and text structure. Its fifth part is the report of the experiment made on the sentence-oriented approach and discourse-oriented approach and the result analysis and the last part is the conclusion.The key points of this thesis are: A .Studying the features, theoretical bases of proofreading and the main reasons for students' poor performance in proofreading. B. Applying discourse analysis to high school English teaching in order to strengthen students' discourse analysis and improve their comprehensive language ability. The original ideas of this paper are: studying the features of the proofreading test and the main causes of students' errors in the proofreading test to analyze the relation between proofreading and discourse, putting the theory of discourse analysis into the practice of high school teaching English for the improvement of students' performance in NMET proofreading. One reason for doing so is that most researches on proofreading are often carried out from the perspective of test validity and reliability both at home and abroad, without much done on the relation between discourse analysis and proofreading.In the end, the thesis comes to a conclusion that the discourse-oriented approach should be strengthened in senior high school English teaching because it helps the students learn grammar and vocabulary in the discourse context, get to know the communicative function of the sentences in discourse, understand the text structure and finally develop the comprehensive competence and enhance the students' ability in NMET proofreading.