A Study On Application Of Discourse Analysis To English Exposition Summary Writing Teaching In High School

Summary writing is a complex task that combines reading and writing.It not only examines students’ reading ability to obtain key information,but also their writing ability to reorganize the information according to the original text,making it an important way to examine students’ core competence of English subject.As an academic writing task,summary writing has been widely studied abroad.With the advancement of the college entrance examination reform in China,especially after the adoption of summary writing in Zhejiang,Guangdong and Shanghai,it gradually gained more and more attention in high school English teaching.At present,domestic researches on summary writing mainly focus on college English academic writing and other advanced English tests like TOEFL.Most of the other researches related to high school English writing are the discussions of high school English teachers on general issues such as summary writing teaching models and strategies.Although some of these researches pointed out the significance of discourse in summary writing,the discourse analysis research on the summary writing teaching practice,especially on that of exposition,has not been carried out effectively.Based on discourse analysis theory and input-output hypothesis,the research explores three questions among subjects of grade 1 students in a Jinan high school through the questionnaire,interviews,pre-test and post-test.The research questions are the current situation of high school English exposition summary writing teaching,the feasible teaching design of applying discourse analysis to exposition summary writing teaching and the effect of the teaching design.The results of teachers’ interview and students’ questionnaire showed the following major problems in current exposition summary writing teaching.First,although the teachers can generally recognize the importance of discourse in exposition summary writing teaching,they are faced with the problem involving how to improve the traditional teaching design for effective discourse-based teaching.Second,students are not familiar with the task of summary writing,which is mainly manifested as the difficulty in grasping text structure and key information,as well as the need to strengthen summary’s cohesion and coherence.Accordingly,under the guidance of discourse analysis theory,this research constructs the flow chart of exposition summary writing teaching design and generates the teaching plan that can be used in classroom teaching.Using this teaching design,the research carried out a three-month teaching experiment in two parallel classes of the senior high school.The following conclusions can be obtained through student interviews.Students’ discourse awareness has been improved,which is mainly reflected in their higher sensitivity to discourse markers,better understanding of basic cohesive devices,and more attention to cohesion and coherence.Most students expect teachers to continue to use this teaching design.In addition,by comparing the scores in pre-test and post-test,the research found that students’ performance of exposition summary writing has improved significantly.Through the analysis of the specific writing ability in the rating scale,the research found that the summary’s consistency with the original text along with the cohesion and coherence of the summary have improved apparently.However,what remains to be further improved is the feasibility in students’ avoidance of copying whole sentences and their exposure to more exposition structure patterns.