Application Of Systemic Functional Linguistics To English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

The reading ability plays an important role in the process of language learning. However, the English reading teaching in high school at present remains pay much attention to vocabulary teaching, but not the understanding of the discourse as a whole; pay much attention to the sentence translation, but not the function of language, and pay much attention to grammar teaching, but not the combination with context. As a result, it has a great effect on the development of the students’ reading ability, making it hard for students to understand the whole discourse or grasp the author’s attitude. Therefore, it is essential to design an efficient teaching model to improve the students’ reading ability.Since Systemic Functional Linguistics was put forward, the scholars all over the world began to focus on it. An increasing number of the scholars began to try to apply some important theories within Systemic Functional Linguistics, such as meta- functions, and context and so on, to English teaching. But in reading teaching especially in the English reading teaching in senior high school, the research is still limited. Based on the researches of the application of Systemic Functional Linguistics to English teaching, the researcher combines the teaching progress in class and conducts an experiment to explore a new reading teaching model in English reading teaching in senior high school.The experimental research is adopted in this paper. In the process of the experiment, 60 students similar in educational background and reading level are divided into two classes: the experimental class and the control class. During the experiment, the students in controlled class are taught according to the traditional teaching method, such as starting with vocabularies, translating the discourse sentence by sentence and focusing on grammar. Meanwhile, the students in experimental class are taught according to the new English reading teaching model under the guidance of Systemic Functional Linguistics. Firstly, by means of analyzing the theme of the title and the first sentence of each paragraph, the teacher instructs the students to predict the main idea of the text. Secondly, based on the thematic structure, cohesion, transitivity, mood and modality, the teacher instructs the students to analyze the whole text to construct the framework of the whole text and figure out the attitude of the writer. Thirdly, according to context, the teacher instructs the students to infer the meaning of unknown words or expressions. During the experiment, the two classes share the same teacher and the same reading material.The research of the thesis leads to the following findings, that is, the reading teaching model put forward by the researcher can make students read more efficiently and understand more correctly. The students can break the traditional model of reading, from beginning with the new words to beginning with the whole text. The application of the new model can help the students predict the main idea, construct the framework, know about the purpose of the author, know clearly what the text is going on, and avoid misreading. All in all, this model is efficient in English reading teaching in senior high school.