A Discourse Analysis Study Of The Reading Materials And Exercises In The Textbooks "New Century English"(S1A-S2B)

As a linguistic unit which is beyond the sentence level, discourse has been receiving increasing attention in the past thirty years or so, and linguists have been showing great interest in the fields of study within discourse analysis, like cohesion and coherence, genre, discourse patterns, and context. However, their application in foreign language teaching, particularly in textbook development is barely satisfactory.Reading is the combination of text messages and a variety of pedagogical knowledge in terms of grammar, vocabulary and discourse. Nevertheless, most of the reading materials and their accompanying activities in textbooks only pay attention to reading for meaning, and vocabulary or grammar analysis, hardly giving consideration to how meaning is conveyed through the medium of language. Such negligence hinders students’development of reading ability and even their overall language competence.Discourse analysis is a study showing interest in how different elements in a text are organized, and how they are related to each other. Therefore, it can be an ideal principle guiding textbook compilers or teachers to explore new means to help students establish their discourse awareness, and teach them certain discourse strategies to attack texts in a more scientific way.Therefore, this thesis attempts to link almost all the research fields in discourse analysis that are relevant to language teaching. Since the whole teaching practice is launched around textbooks,"New Century English" S1A-S2B are targeted as the research subjects, and with the aid of the data collected from the series of books, the thesis analyzes the reading materials and their accompanying tasks from the perspective of the four domains, namely the content domain, the genre domain, the language domain and the strategy domain, to further investigate the genre type, discourse patterns, thematic development, cohesion, coherence and textuality and context. Based on the analysis and discussion, practical and concrete suggestions are made as implications for English textbook compilation, especially for reading materials selection and the related tasks design. The results of the research reveal that1)"New Century English" S1A-S2B present diversified materials for language input, but it is desirable to make improvement on textual coherence and richness of genre types;2) in terms of reading tasks, most of them coincide with Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive objectives, but activities concerning discourse features, organization and strategies are suggested to be involved.In writing this thesis, the author wishes to raise the awareness of textbook compilers and teachers of the importance of discourse analysis in guiding the teaching of reading comprehension, and applying more and more spirits of this theory into textbook compilation in the future.