Genre Analysis And The Teaching Of Discourse Reading

In recent years, genre analysis has been a public-concern area and comprises a new research project in stylistic analysis and discourse analysis, aiming at studying the communicative purposes and strategies in language use. Genre analysis goes beyond the surface-level description of language; rather, it attempts to interpret the deep-level rationale of discourse construction, examines the social and cognitive factors in the field of discourse structure, and reveals the special form of realization of both communicative purposes and the regularity of discourse construction. With the development of the genre analysis theory, it is gradually applied to language teaching, resulting in the genre-based approach based on the theory of genre analysis. As for vocational English teaching, it has high structural formation and definite communicative purpose, communicative subject and particular topic, making its discourse form different from other styles of discourse; thus, making vocational English teaching more suitable for the implementation of a genre-based reading teaching approach. Although the genre-based teaching approach is very popular abroad, it is still in its period of infancy in China and both of its theoretical research and practice are also insufficient.The study holds certain pedagogical implications. From the present study,it is known that genre analysis is a potentially powerful pedagogical tool in foreign language teaching, particularly in vocational English teaching. This tool can be used to teach students to build their genre awareness, enable students to increase their reading confidence and enjoyment, help students to transfer their learned knowledge to reading and writing more effectively, and require teachers to be more qualified in order to play more roles in acting as a teacher, course designer and materials provider, collaborator, researcher, and evaluator.