An Expeirmental Study Of Genre-based College English Reading Teaching Model

Comprehension can be divided into three different levels, that is, literalcomprehension, interpretive/inferential comprehension and critical/creativecomprehension. After several years of English study, university students shouldpursuit a higher level of discourse comprehension, not limited to the comprehensionof just some words, phrases and sentences. However, surveys find that collegestudents have poor discourse comprehension level. What leads to this situation istraditional teaching due to its overweight on teaching vocabulary and grammar,ignoring the teaching of genre structure and genre characteristics.Through analyzing the different genres of texts, genre-based teaching approachreveals the different language forms and different genre structures. It helps studentsrealize what the genre is and understand the text in a macro way and so readingcomprehension can be improved into a higher level.This thesis put genre-based teaching approach into the teaching of collegeEnglish reading in order to improve their discourse reading ability. The author putforward the hypothesis that genre-based approach could improve the readingcomprehension level to a higher level of discourse comprehension. In order to testifythis hypothesis, teaching experiment was conducted, in which a genre-based readingmodel was applied. The one-term teaching experiment is carried out among80sophomores of Software College of a University and the author adopts quantitativeand qualitative methods in the teaching experiment. Quantitative method includesreading comprehension tests to experimental class and comparing class before andafter the teaching experiment and qualitative method of individual interviews only tothe experimental class. After the teaching experiment, the author analyses the datacollected from the experiment. From the data analysis, we can conclude that thestudents in the experimental class performed better on discourse comprehension,thus, it indicates that genre-based teaching approach can improve the readingcomprehension level, achieving a higher level of discourse comprehension, whichtestifies the experiment hypothesis successfully.