An Application Study Of Discourse Pattern In English Reading Teaching

When learning any language, we need enormous language input. So,it is self-evident that reading,as the main source of language input, plays a vital role in the language learning process.Reading has always been the focus of English teaching,but as we know, the traditional way of teaching English reading focuses so much on explaining the meaning of the words,sentences and grammatical structures that it ignores the analysis of the whole structure of the text,which can’t help improve the students’ ability of using the language comprehensively.Fortunately,the research into discourse analysis theory can make up for the shortcomings of the traditional reading teaching pattern, showing a new way for us to reform our reading teaching pattern.After studying the theories related to discourse analysis, such as the schema theory and the discourse cohesion theory and analyzing some research on the application study of discourse pattern in English reading teaching both at home and abroad, the author tries to apply discourse pattern to senior English reading teaching and put forward the five steps of teaching English reading under discourse pattern, that is,, lead-in, fast reading, intensive reading, consolidation, and discussion. The research is designed to find out the answers to the following questions:1. Whether the teachers and students apply discourse analysis theory to improve their reading abilities?2. Whether the discourse pattern can improve the students’ ability to summarize the main idea,infer and guess the meaning based on the context?3. To what extent can discourse pattern improve the students’reading abilities comprehensively?The research is conducted in Shashi Middle School of Hubei Province. First, before the experiment, the author conducts a survey by using a questionnaire to know how frequently the teachers and students apply discourse analysis to direct their reading. At the same time, a test is given to the students both in the contrast class and the experimental class to test their reading abilities. Then, during the half-year experiment, the students in contrast class are trained by using traditional reading teaching pattern and the students in experimental class are trained by using discourse pattern.After the experiment is over,the students in experimental class are surveyed again by using the same questionnaire as the one before the experiment and we can see great change has taken place. Meanwhile the students in both class are given another test on their reading abilities.By analyzing the results of the questionnaire before and after the experiment and the results of the two tests, we can safely conclude that discourse pattern can really cultivate the students’ awareness of discourse and greatly improve their ability to find out the main idea of the passage, infer and guess the meaning based on the context. It is helpful to improve the students’ reading abilities to a great extent.Finally, by reflecting on the strengths and weaknesses of this experimental research, the author concludes that in the future, we should insist on applying the discourse theory to English reading teaching and constantly improve the teaching pattern so as to make the research perfect.