Discourse Analysis In College English Reading Teaching

Reading is an indispensable cognitive activity in human communcation. It is also an important way to grasp linguistic knowledge and get information. Developing students'reading ability is the aim of English teaching. However, there is an obvious gap between the present reading teaching and the fixed requirements. Students have a larger number of vocabulary and can make correct sentences; but their reading ability on the textual level is not developed effectively. They are unable to grasp the main idea conveyed through the written text; they are unable to understand the writer's own opinion and attitude; they are unable to tackle strange lexical-items from the context, they are slow in reading, and any unfamiliar word will block up their reading ,etc. The problem mainly lies in the out-of-date teaching method and the teacher-centred class. The teacher teaches a lot about words and grammar, but ignores the relationship of words and paragraphs in the text. On the other hand, students tend to be so dependent on teachers in the process of reading, they are usually deprived of the opportunity to get message in the text themselves in reading class. So changing the teaching ideas, studying the nature of reading, cultivating students a good reading habit and training their reading strategies will be the subject of the thesis .In reading, the most important thing is that we should understand reading process. Researchers try to interpret the process by proposing various models. These models are generally clarified as bottom-up, top-down, interactive and schema model. They have touched upon some factors that can influence reading comprehension and have exerted a strong influence on reading teaching and have helped improve ESL reading teaching in China a lot. However, these models have their limitations, so reading theories need supplementing with new perspectives.The thesis tries to embody students a more efficient reading method—discourse-analysis reading model, to overcome their present reading difficulties, to help them master the nature of reading by inputting the discourse theory. It integrates the elite of the four traditional reading models. It is based on the research of cognitive linguistics and pragmatics, it stresses not only language points but also background knowledge and global structure of discourse. It shows that reading is a communicative process between the author, the reader and the discourse.On reading teaching process, students view the discourse as a whole, based on discourse theories, students grasp the author's attitudes, undertand the text organization, and get the message the text intends to convey. In this model the whole process of reading teaching falls into pre-reading activities, while-reading activities and post-reading activities. Pre-reading activities value activating the background knowledge of students before reading. While-reading activities emphasize the need for teacher to stand out of the way to provide a quiet surroundings for students to read independently, to make them to get the main idea, understand the text organization,and grasp some cohesive devices, etc. Post-reading activities throw light on students' personal response to the content of reading which can be organized into oral exercise and written exercise.In details this reading model guides reading from the following aspects: (1)to improve students'reading ability at discourse level; (2)to reinforce students'awareness of discourse knowledge, to get students not to neglect the language points and simultaneously grasp the global structure of the discourse; (3) to provide students with background knowledge ; (4) to teach students to identify reference, discourse markers, schema theory, theme/rheme, context, etc; (5)to cultivate students'ability of inferring and predicting from context.In the end, some factors contributing to the implementation are emphasized. It is said revising teacher's and students'misconception of reading, realizing students'active role in reading and modifying teacher's role to be an organizer, guide and helper are the three determinants of successful fulfillment of this reading model.