The Application Of Discourse Analysis To Senior English Teaching Of Reading

Reading is the main source of English input, and its teaching plays an important role inEnglish teaching. High school English teaching of reading still concentrates on words andphrases on syntactic level, focusing on the explanation of grammar, which lets the studentsunderstand the surface meaning of the words, and they read the articles without interestbecause they ignore the central idea of the paragraph, the theme of the article and the author’sintention of writing. From this perspective, because of the new ideology that emphasizes onthe development of students’ discourse competence, discourse analysis teaching is becomingthe bridge between the students’ real mastered situation and the current teaching aims.In this thesis, with questionnaires and experiments, setting Advanced with Englishelective module6as an example, aims to verify that discourse analysis teaching can beintegrated as a positive teaching method by developing students discourse competenceeffectively and efficiently and raising students reading interest. In the research, two classes ofgrade one from Xiangtan County Second School were chosen as the subjects. Each classconsisted of50students, one as a control group and the other as the experimental group. Bothclasses are at the same English level and have the same teacher. The discourse analysismethod was adopted during the experimental class while the traditional method was utilizedas usual in the control class. In the method of discourse analysis, the whole process of readingteaching falls into three stages: pre-reading stage, background knowledge and some otherrelevant genre knowledge are introduced before reading in this stage, this is helpful to arousestudents’ interest and motivation; then comes the while-reading stage, at this stage, studentsare led to find out the text structure and the main idea through skimming from a macroscopicperspective, and the same time the students are taught to pay attention to signals of cohesive,hence to reach a detailed interpreting of a text; the following is the post-reading stage, At thefinal stage---post-reading, students are required to judge on the quality, value, accuracy andtruthfulness of information by evaluating the effect the author wishes to produce. The authorconducted one term experiment, by pre-test and post-test, two kinds of questionnaire surveys and the collection of a qualitative data complement. The research presents the results of thestatistical analysis of the data collection by SPSS21.0for the research questions and detaileddiscussion on each research question.From the analysis of the pre-tests-and post-tests, it revealed that the experimental classreading ability higher than the control class, this means that the students in discourse analysisreading class have developed their English reading ability better than those in the control class.In addition, the questionnaire analysis shows that the discourse analysis approach can enhancethe students’ interest and self-confidence in English reading. The discourse analysis plays aneffective role in the English reading teaching in senior high schools. Of course its intrinsiclimitations are needed to improve in the reading teaching process by our middle schoolteachers.