Analyses Of Attitudes In Story Genres From English Textbooks For Senior High Schools (oxford/shanghai)

Reading plays a significant role in English learning. However, according to recent researches on English reading of senior high school students in China, problems still exist. The main problem is that students can only get the surface meaning and are unable to understand the main idea, underlying meaning of reading passages or the writer's purpose. One of the most important reasons lies in their lack of consciousness of discourse.The Appraisal Theory is concerned with interpersonal meanings at the level of discourse semantics. Attitude system is the central system within appraisal system. Exploration of attitudinal resources can help readers to reveal the writers'attitudes and to discover the implied meanings. Although research on application of the Appraisal Theory to college English reading has been done domestically, seldom has been done to the reading teaching in high schools. Research at high schools is mainly focused on the in-class practices, with less theoretical support.Story genre is the most widely used and highly valued genre in all cultures. In English textbooks there is usually a large proportion of this genre. It is through the interpersonal meanings that we can see the attractiveness of stories. The application of the Appraisal Theory to story genres can be greatly beneficial to the adequate understanding of the texts.Data from the Oxford English for Senior High Schools (Shanghai) used by most of senior high schools in Shanghai are investigated. After a general exploration, three texts are chosen as different story genres for us to analyze their attitudinal resources and to reveal their main ideas, implicit meanings and writers'purposes.It is found that the common features of the three sub-story genres are their abundance in affectual and appreciating resources and lack of Judgement resources, which can be accounted for by the different local purposes of sub-genres of the story family. Also the interaction between attitude system and story genre theory is displayed: distribution of attitudinal resources at different stages of sub-story genres can be used to explain the differences of their goals; exploration on attitudinal resources can be used to reveal the underlying meanings, and investigation of generic stages can help readers to get the main ideas of texts and see how writers'purposes are achieved stage by stage. Based on these analyses, implications are offered as far as reading of story genres is concerned.This research is expected to contribute to the deep understanding of texts for students and systematic teaching of story genres for teachers. Also it can provide theoretical support for many of those researches mainly with practical experiences.