An Empirical Study On Discourse Analysis In College English Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension ability is one of the important indicators to evaluate how well a student can use English comprehensively. However, in China, the traditional teaching method is ineffective in improving non-English major students’ English reading ability. Therefore, how to help non-English major students improve their English reading comprehension ability becomes one of the focuses among domestic scholars and experts.The purpose of this study is to explore and answer the following three questions: firstly, what the factors that prevent non-English major students from improving their English reading comprehension ability are; secondly, what on earth the level of non-English major students in English reading comprehension is; thirdly, whether discourse analysis is beneficial for non-English majors to improve their English reading comprehension ability, and if it is, in what degree it is.To complete the goals of this study, the author chose eighty-five students of two parallel classes from Shenyang Normal University as the participants. One class was assigned as the experimental group, and the other controlled group. The instruments used in the research mainly include questionnaire and test. And the procedure can mainly be divided into three stages: pre-experiment stage, during-experiment stage and post-experiment stage.After analyzing the data collected, the researcher came up with the following conclusions: firstly, low interest, instrumental motivation, passive attitude, insufficient time, together with not enough attention paid to the syntactic structure, logical structure and the linking devices as well as the importance of the background information and their own cognitive ability, are the causes that hinder students’ improvements in English reading comprehension; secondly, students from two classes stay at low level in English reading comprehension whether before or after the experimental instruction although almost all of them make progress, more or less, during that semester; thirdly, discourse analysis based on schema theory and cohesion theory is more beneficial for non-English major students to improve their English reading comprehension ability than traditional English reading teaching.In the end, the research provides implications for college English teachers in English reading instruction, that is, to help students make macro discourse analysis based on schema theory so that students may get the main idea and the overall structure, and help them make micro discourse analysis based on cohesion theory so that students may understand how to use linking devices and guess the meaning of new words.