The Application Of Genre Theories To English Reading Teaching In China’s Senior High School

Reading is the ability to get information via words and also a bridge connecting readers and knowledge. In modern society, almost all knowledge depends on the ability to obtain information through reading in different ways. In the college entrance examination, reading accounts for the highest percentage of scores in the whole paper.Thus, for English learning in senior high school, students and teachers should pay more attention to the improvement of reading ability. At present, however, most of the English teachers of senior high school in China still adopt the traditional teaching approach, which is hard for them to improve the students’ reading ability in a genuine way. Traditional reading teaching approach focuses on the language points and results in the situation where students only see the tree but not the forest. Students’ reading speed and accuracy have not been satisfactory for a long time.The writer of this dissertation tries to apply genre theories to English reading teaching in senior high school from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics and aims to train the students’ ability to grasp one text’s idea from the whole text structure and develop their genre awareness. It is hoped that in this way they can improve reading efficiency and their reading comprehension ability.This dissertation carries out the study by statistics and a teaching experiment and gives the detailed teaching plans of the texts of main genres in senior high school,that is, narration and exposition. Firstly, it introduces the significance and questions as well as the organization. Chapter 2 is the literature review including three teaching models, schema theory and it briefly introduces the history and development as well as features of genre theories. Chapter 3 is about the theoretical foundation containing three genre analyzing frameworks. Chapter 4 deals with the research and application of readers-centered genre analyzing approach to English reading teaching in senior high school, which takes the two main genres’ texts for example. Chapter 5 is the teaching experiment, which utilizes the SPSS software to analyze the data and the result proves that the teaching approach proposed in this thesis is effective. The lastchapter answers the researching questions and provides some suggestions for researchers and teachers. It is hoped that the reaching teaching approach based on genre theories can be focused on and improved in the near future.