Application Of Discourse Structure In The Middle School Reading Instruction

The English Syllabus for Senior Middle School Students issued by the Ministry of Education of China points out that one of the main tasks of China's middle school English classes is to train the students to read English efficiently. So the goal of English reading teaching is to help develop the students' reading skills and the abilities of reading comprehension. At present reading teaching in middle school is ineffective. Students cannot write letters appropriately or communicate with other people in English. They cannot give the main idea of a text which contains few new words. The reason is that teachers neglect text structure. After the teaching reform, another wrong method of teaching reading emerges, which neglects the linguistic knowledge of students. As a result, students' reading ability remains rather poor. In order to develop students reading ability effectively, the theories about reading should be studied.This paper was classified into 6 chapters:Chapter I indicates the significance of reading and introduces the contents of the dissertation briefly.Chapter II reveals the nature of reading, puts forward some assumptions related to reading and gives a new definition of reading.Chapter III discusses three reading process models: top-down model, bottom-up model and interactive model.Chapter IV studies the schemata theory and its relation with reading,Chapter V discusses text structure: structural characteristics of text and effects of text structure on reading comprehension.Chapter VI presents two case studies. The results of one experiment which tests the function of schemata in reading comprehension shows that background knowledge and linguistic knowledge can facilitate comprehension, and the background knowledge plays a more important role. The other experiment proves that the use of the structure strategy facilitates comprehension.In order to develop the students' reading ability, I put forward the "a whole text teaching approach" to the teaching of reading, which combines text structure theory and schemata theory. A detailed discussion is presented in this paper about how to apply this approach to the teaching of English to senior middle school students in China.