An Empirical Study Of The Effects Of Discourse Analysis Based Teaching On Junior School Students’ English Reading Ability

In the process of second language learning, reading comprehension plays an important role. Reading is one of the most important ways in which students gain information, also, it provides the most efficient and important channel of linguistic input. The New Curriculum has made higher requirements for students’ reading ability. It accounts for 40 percent of the total scores in the entrance examination to senior middle schools in Luogang District of Guangzhou City. However, in the present reading teaching practice, many teachers find it difficult to improve the students’ reading comprehension. And the students’ reading comprehension is far from being satisfying. Under this situation, reading teaching becomes a recent trend in the research of foreign language education. And many teachers have been tried to apply discourse analysis into their reading teaching.Given the above issues and the current status, this thesis would like to make an empirical study to explore whether the application of discourse analysis to reading teaching can improve the reading comprehension of junior middle school students; with a view to give certain implications to junior middle school English reading teaching. To be more specific, the following two research questions are put forward in this thesis:1) Is discourse analysis based reading teaching more effective in improving the students’ English reading comprehension?2) Does discourse analysis based reading teaching have positive influence on students’ discourse reading strategies?The experiment was carried out in Grade Seven in Zhenlong Middle School. The experiment lasted for sixteen weeks. Two classes with similar English level are chosen to participate in the study. One is an experimental class, and the other is a control class. In the whole procedure of teaching, the same teaching materials are used and are taught by the same teacher, but different approaches are adopted. In the EC( the experimental class), discourse analysis approach is applied into reading teaching, but in the CC( the control class)the traditional reading teaching is still carried out without the instructions of discourse analysis. The empirical study consists of pretests, a series of classroom teaching experiments, post-tests and questionnaires. The author analyzed the data by SPSS.The major findings are: 1) The discourse-based reading teaching can improve the students’ reading comprehension. 2) The discourse-based reading teaching has positive influence on students’ discourse reading strategies.The findings show that the discourse based reading teaching method is feasible and efficient in a way.