Discourse Analysis Applied In Senior English Reading Comprehension Teaching

Traditional English reading teaching focuses on the teaching of language. It centers around teachers, who devote attention to words, phrases and sentences. Such teaching method destroys the unity of reading material as discourses, and causes some common problems with students' reading ability: students' reading inferences;students tend to grasp words or phrases rather than the general idea of reading materials.Reading is a complicated process of psycho-linguistic activity and the result of interaction among the author, language information and the reader. Reading comprehension is in essence the result of the interaction among reader's concept competence, background knowledge and processing strategies. The teaching and learning of reading aim to turn the perceptional input o f reading materials into the best process of comprehension of the passage. The author of this thesis based on the analysis of the existing problems in English reading teaching, discusses the relation between discourse and reading and points out the important effect of discourse analysis on reading comprehension.He recommends that discourse analysis be applied to the teaching of reading.In order to verify the effectiveness of the recommended teaching method, the author of this thesis carried out a survey and an experiment among senior one students at Suizhou No.1 Middle School of Zengdu District. The survey is done before the experiment. It includes a questionnaire with 16 questions. The survey reflects the existing problems in the present reading course in senior middle school and students, expectation of the reading course. The one week experiment is done. The students are divided into two classes. One class is the experiment class, where discourse analysis is applied in the teaching of reading. The other is the controlled class, where the teaching of reading is carried out in the usual way. Results of the experiment indicate that the experiment class makes significantly greater progress than the controlled class within 8 weeks. Therefore, the conclusion can be drawn that the application of discourse analysis to senior middle school English reading teaching is efficitient.Based on the survey and experiment, the author of this thesis puts forward a few suggestions about senior middle English reading teaching.