Applying Textual Metafunction To Teaching Experiencing English

The traditional college English teaching in China has its shortcomings due to the fact that traditional teachers treat phonetics, grammar, vocabulary and sentence structure as their main tasks in language teaching. Discourse is ignored but specific language points are excessively concerned. This fact results in poor comprehensive abilities of students. For this sake, the present thesis attempts to demonstrate the feasibility of applying textual metafunction to teaching activities in Experiencing English with the guidance of textual metafunction. Textual metafunction refers to a linguistic mechanism which arranges discourses into a coherent and unified one, the mechanism distinguishes discourses from random phrases. Textual metafunction is widely utilized in linguistic science as well as foreign language teaching.The thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter One is a brief introduction to the study, including the research objects, purpose and organization of the thesis. Chapter Two introduces Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) and presents one of its branches textual metafunction in details. Application of textual metafunction to English teaching is analyzed at the same time. Textual metafunction holds that English teaching should not focus on language training only on sentence level, but also on context level to cultivate students’ communicative ability. Chapter Three introduces the methodology and procedures of the demonstration. Pedagogy based on textual metafunction is illustrated specifically in this chapter. Chapter Four shows the results and analysis of the demonstration. The author does the research while teaching Experiencing English in Qiongzhou University, the result shows that textual metafunction is feasible and practical. Chapter Five discusses the implication and suggestion from the research. Chapter Six is a conclusion of the study and it finds the limitation of the study. The author hopes that the research will, in some degree, make some contribution to college English teaching.