An Empirical Study Of College English Reading Teaching Directed By Discourse Analysis

English reading has been an important part of college English teaching for a long time.However,students are not very interested in English reading because of the traditional reading teaching method.It is very common that students cannot understand the article and the main idea.With the deepening of college English teaching reform,College English Curriculum Requirement was published by Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China in 2007.It not only divides English reading competence into three levels that college students should arrive at,but also gives some suggestions about college English teaching.That is,the teaching of reading,writing and translation can be conducted either in the classroom or online.In order to improve the current situation,based on Intelligent Center of Vocational Education(ICVE),discourse analysis is applied to college English reading teaching in this research.It aims at exploring the influence of discourse analysis on college students’ reading achievements and reading competence.The researcher tries to direct college English reading teaching from two perspectives--macro discourse analysis and micro discourse analysis and five aspects--context,genre,textual pattern,cohesion and coherence.In general,this research aims to solve four issues:(1)What is the current reading level of non-English major freshmen?(2)In order to improve students’ reading competence and reading achievements,how can a college English reading teaching model be designed on the basis of discourse analysis?(3)Is the application of discourse analysis helpful to improve college students’ English reading achievements?(4)Under the guidance of discourse analysis,can students analyze context,genre,textual pattern,cohesion and coherence of a discourse on their own?In this study,the number of the subjects is 75 in total.They are freshmen of non-English majors in Shenyang Normal University.These students are from two parallel classes and the English proficiency of these two classes is nearly equal.In Experimental Class(EC),discourse analysis and ICVE are applied to English readingteaching,and there are 38 students.While in Control Class(CC),the traditional teaching method and ICVE are applied to English reading teaching,and there are 37 students.In this study,the research methods are experiment,test and questionnaire,the research instruments include questionnaires and English reading tests.During the experiment of a semester(15 weeks),the researcher collects the data of questionnaires and reading tests.After the experiment,all of the results are contrasted and analyzed through SPSS 16.0.The results show that:(1)Before the experiment,according to the results of the pre-questionnaire,students in EC and CC know little about discourse analysis and they are not very interested in reading English.In terms of the results of the pre-test,their reading achievements are in a middle level and there is no significant difference between EC and CC.(2)According to the theoretical basis of discourse analysis,the researcher divides the experimental process into 3 stages and 6 steps,which is from two perspectives(macro discourse analysis and micro discourse analysis)and five aspects(context,genre,textual pattern,cohesion and coherence).(3)After the experiment,compared with the students in CC,the students in EC have obviously improved their reading achievements,especially in cohesion and coherence.(4)Students can analyze context,genre,textual pattern,cohesion and coherence of a discourse on their own.Discourse analysis is helpful to improve their reading competence.It can be seen that students’ reading achievements and reading competence can be improved under the guidance of discourse analysis.Hence,discourse analysis can not only provide theoretical basis for college English reading teaching,but also can improve its current teaching situation.Moreover,by optimizing teachers’ teaching process and students’ learning process,ICVE helps to activate students’ interest in learning English,which should be widely applied to the actual English teaching.