The Application Of Discourse Analysis On Teaching English Reading In Senior High School

Teaching English reading is an important constituent of the language teaching. Reading is the mainsource and way of language input and accumulation, and also the stage in which students listen, say, writeand other related basic knowledge skills are cultivated. Traditional teaching method lays too much stress onthe grammar, the syntactic knowledge explanation and the instruction. In the traditional teaching method,teachers divided the whole text into several separate language points and then impart these separatelinguistic points to students, which neglects the cultivation of discourse ability and the actual raise oflanguage utilization ability. According to "English New Curriculum Standard"(i.e." New CurriculumStandard "), students should be qualified with the synthesis reading ability, including languagecomprehension ability and language decoding ability. New Curriculum Standard emphasizes themulti-disciplinary knowledge. Students' ability in obtaining, processing information and analyzing andsolving questions should be enhanced. Therefore, how to improve students reading ability with thediscourse analysis is worth discussing.This research, connecting with three popular models of reading processing, the schema theory anddiscourse analysis, analyzes the effects of the application of the discourse analysis on teaching Englishreading in senior high schools. The research method of the present study includes test, questionnaireinvestigation and the instruments of the SPSS11.0(Statistical Package for Social Sciences). The researchanswers the following questions:1.What are the present situation and problems of reading teaching insenior high school and students reading habits?2. What are the effects of discourse analysis teaching modelin English reading class in a senior high school?3. How does the discourse analysis affect students' readingability? and aims at testifying the application of discourse analysis on teaching reading in senior highschool, strengthening students' understanding of the text and improving their reading abilities. In theresearch, the participants are100students in two classes from the second year of No.1senior high middleschools in Xinxiang. In three months' teaching experiment, the experimental group is guided by thediscourse analysis teaching method, and the controlled group is guided by the traditional teaching method.The results of the pre-test and the post-test show that though the two groups are equal in reading proficiency before the experiment, there appear a obvious gap between the two groups after the experiment.The introduction of the knowledge of discourse by the English teacher make students in the experimentalgroup can make good use of the background, cohesive devices knowledge and the context into the readingstrategies to help understand the discourse in a more effective way. The discourse analysis is a moreefficient teaching method in English reading teaching than traditional teaching. The present study hasenriched the theory of discourse analysis as an approach to English reading teaching, but also enlightenedthe teaching of English writing and listening.The thesis has five chapters. The first chapter introduces the background concerning some previousstudies on discourse analysis at home and abroad, research objectives, research motivation and significanceof the survey and the outline of the thesis. The second chapter mainly reviews the nature of reading, whichis explained well through three popular models of reading processing and the schema theory, the currentsituation and problems of teaching English reading in senior high school, the situation and defects of thetraditional teaching method. At the same time, this chapter introduces the definition and the content of thediscourse analysis. The third chapter gives an introduction to the research questions, subjects, methodologyand the procedure. The fourth chapter is data collection and analysis of the research data. In chapter five,the author summarizes the implication on teaching English reading, the research and its limitation.