| This study explores the application of systemic functional grammar (SFG) in Chinese college English reading teaching from textual metafunction perspective. The present traditional English reading teaching approach in China puts emphasis on language form and sentence structure, and seems to focus too much on the sentence level, but when coming to the discourse level, seldom have teachers or students pay attention to it. As a result, it leads to the problem that students find great difficulty in getting the main idea of an article. In view of the weak points of the present teaching approach, this paper tries to explore a more effective way of teaching, that is, to teach English reading from textual metafunction perspective.The paper starts with the critical review of the pertinent studies on English reading at home and abroad. It proposes the problems of English reading teaching in China and the necessity and urges to improve it. This study takes Halliday’s theory of systemic functional grammar as theoretical basis. It gives a brief review of textual metafunction in SFG. The author mainly introduces two systems of textual metafunction:thematic structure and cohesion, as well as their application to the English reading teaching. Halliday claims that text can be considered as a large information unit which is well organized by signals. Based on pertinent research, the author believes that this provides a new perspective for the College English teaching and will be helpful for the improvement of students’ reading ability. The teaching methods and procedures of the study are analyzed specifically in this paper. In order to verify the proposition of this study, the author conducts an experiment in two classes:the Control class (CC) and the Experimental class (EC). Two senior classes of non-English majors from Liaoning Finance and Trade College are chosen as subjects, each consisting of31students. In this experiment, the focuses of the teacher’s guidance are different:the guidance in the CC is traditional:such as grammar, sentence structure; while the EC is taught the structure of the texts, thematic structure and cohesion in addition to that in the CC. Each class has two tests. The pretest and the posttest are rated by two teachers with the rating standard for the reading item in CET-4. To answer the research questions scientifically and clearly, the SPSS is used to perform the analysis of the collected data. And the T-test is applied to exam the students’reading scores. The results show that, before the experiment, the scores are almost the same; but after the experiment, the scores of EC are obviously higher than that of CC. From this study, the author draws the conclusion:Firstly, the application of textural metafunction theory on English reading teaching can make students read more efficiently and understand better; Secondly, the application of textual metafuction theory on reading can improve the students’whole reading ability; Thirdly, the application of textual metafuction theory can improve students’deep level reading ability which is required by the new curriculum by summarizing information, grasp the main idea, making inferences, as well as make use of the knowledge which learned before.This research reveals that the competence of students’English reading has greatly improved after the application of textual metafunction into English reading teaching. Hopefully, this new application can contribute to Chinese college English reading teaching. |
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