A Study On The Application Of Discourse Analysis To English Reading In Senior High School

The New English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School(2017)emphasizes the importance of discourse which means students need to have the awareness of discourse analysis in reading.Now,for reading comprehension,students are often taught by the explanation of words by words and sentences in sentences through which they may ignore the context and discourse.In order to help students mobilize their background knowledge and grasp the main idea of the essay,discourse analysis method can be utilized to reading.Under the current way of reading and students' problems in reading process,two questions are proposed:(1)What are the effects of the application of discourse analysis in reading on senior high students' reading ability?(2)What are the changes of senior high students' attitudes towards English reading after the application of discourse analysis in reading? An experiment on applying discourse analysis to reading is carried out in No.10 Senior High School in Shenyang.Class 4 in Grade 3 is chosen as an experimental class(EC),while Class 3 in Grade 3 is selected as control class(CC).CC is taught by their previous way while the reading in EC is under the discourse analysis method from September to November,2019.This thesis uses tests,a questionnaire and an interview to guarantee the reliability and validity.The questionnaire handed out to students in both EC and CC after the teaching experiment is used to explore students' attitudes and their reading ability.The two testscontaining pre-test,post-test as well as an interview are designed to test students' reading ability.After three months of teaching experiment on discourse analysis method,there are two major findings.The first is that the application of discourse analysis in reading can improve students' macro and micro reading ability.For the macro ability,the application of discourse analysis in reading can promote students' ability to extract the main idea and divide the structure of the essay.For the micro ability,the application of discourse analysis in reading can improve students' ability to deal with detailed information and guess the meaning of unfamiliar words.The second is that students become active and positive in reading.The application of discourse analysis in reading can raise students' interest and improve their confidence in reading.Students spend more time on reading and they prefer to attend reading class.However,the small number of students taking part in the experiment may lead the limited analysis of the results and data to some extent.