Appraisal Theory And Its Application To High School English Reading Teaching

Reading is an important way to gain knowledge and information, which is always regarded crucial in language teaching and reading.More and more language teachers and researchers have been devoted to the study of this field. However, the reading abilities of all levels'students are far from being satisfactory. The present study attempts to apply a newly-developed theory, Appraisal Theory, into practical reading teaching.Hopefully, it will provide English teachers with a new perspective of English teaching.Appraisal Theory was brought up by James Martin at the beginning of 1990s.It is an extension and development of M.A.K. Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics.Offering a new analytical tool to better understand the discourses containing evaluative resources,it opens a new area of studying interpersonal meaning. Appraisal Theory consists of three systems:Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation, among which, Attitude mainly refers to the values by which speakers assess participants and processes by reference either to emotional response or to systems of culturally-determined value systems.(White,2000).Engagement is concerned with the linguistic resources which explicitly position a discourse's proposal and propositions inter-subjectivity. Graduation is concerned with resources by which the force can be strengthened or weakened.This thesis chooses Attitude system and its three sub-systems:Affect, Judgment and Appreciation as the theoretical framework, with the hope of contributing to the teaching of high school English reading.From the author's own experience of teaching high school English reading, she finds that most high school students can only get the surface meaning of a passage.They give vocabulary and grammar more than enough emphasis in reading, while thematic messages are greatly neglected. However, it is known that reading is interactivity between the reader and the writer. The two sides need to negotiate, challenge, and disagree in the process of reading. However, for the students, they are blind to the writer's attitudes.Lack of awareness can account for this blindness.So cultivation of this kind of awareness should be given more attention to.After a long time of reading literature, the author finds that the focus of Appraisal Theory matches well with the problems calling for solutions in current reading teaching situation. Therefore, the author develops the idea of applying Appraisal Theory to the teaching of high school English reading, with the hope of helping high school students to reach a higher level of English reading.There are 114 high school students selected as subjects in the experiment. Divided into two groups,the experimental group and the control group,the subjects are treated in two different ways in reading teaching. The Experimental Group is taught on the basis of Appraisal Theory, while the Control Group is treated in a traditional way. The current study uses SPSS software as the statistical tool to analyze the data collected, compare the scores of the two groups in pre-test and post-test. After the analysis and discussion, the author finds that the application of Appraisal Theory to the teaching of high school English reading is helpful to improve students'reading ability.However, the scale of this experiment is not large enough, and the teaching material varies very little.Therefore, it is still in need of future investigations in this field to gain more evidence and support.