College English Reading Instruction: Approached At The Discourse Level

Drawing on the findings from discourse analysis, this thesis focuses on how to instruct college English reading at the discourse level. As known to all, while reading, what readers face directly is discourse, whose information and the regular patterns are keys to reading comprehension. Thus, there is a need to establish our goal of reading instruction on a discourse basis. Discourse is the spoken or written language unit in practice, and the Language entirety made up of a series of continuous utterances or sentences in the process of communication. Cohesion and coherence are important discourse construction devices for textuality across the sentences of a discourse. The basic approaches to reading comprehension dependent on the discourse analysis cover understanding the discourse grammar, discourse types as well as discourse patterns.In order to overcome the drawback in the traditional reading instruction, it is necessary to employ discourse analysis in college English reading instruction and develop text approach. The text approach means to encourage students to read a text as a whole, get the writer's message, understand the text structure and contents, draw important and meaningful information as much as possible from the text and create overall and deep comprehension on the basis of discourse analysis. The paper presents and illustrates some approaches involving detailed teaching process and strategies, which are mainly based on college English textbook as examples. Discourse analysis in reading can help to develop students' competence in comprehending, analyzing and obtaining overall information in a discourse. The application of the text approach in practice is helpful in effectively enhancing students' discourse reading ability, and consequently, promoting the improvement of their communicative competence.