A Study Of English Summary Writing Teaching Based On The Theory Of Discourse Analysis In Senior High Schools

As an experimental site of comprehensive reform of College Entrance Examination,Zhejiang Province has adopted a new writing type--summary writing in National Matriculation English Test writing part since 2016.Regarded as an integrative task involving reading and writing,summary writing puts forward higher requirements to students’ comprehensive ability of understanding,judgment,generalization and expression.This writing item embodies the spirit of the National English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools(2017),according to which,special emphasis must be laid on cultivating students’ key competence.Meanwhile,a growing number of educators have focused on improving students’ summary writing competence.However,most students are not familiar with this new writing item and lack understanding of overall structure,cohesion,coherence,and genre of the text.These are the main contents of discourse analysis.Therefore,based on previous studies,the thesis combines with questionnaires,tests,interview and teaching experiment of summary writing,aiming to investigate the feasibility and effects of discourse-analysis approach applied in senior high schools.This thesis tries to answer the following questions:1)Can the application of discourse analysis to English summary writing teaching contribute to improving students’ summary writing scores?2)What effects does discourse-analysis approach have on summary writing scores of high-proficiency,middle-proficiency,and low-proficiency students respectively?3)What are the attitudes of students at different levels of language proficiency towards the application of discourse analysis to summary writing?To this end,the researcher conducted a 13-week teaching experiment,and the subjects were 100 students from two parallel classes of Grade Two in Nanping No.1Middle School.In the experiment,the researcher applied discourse analysis theory to summary writing teaching in the experimental class,while in the controlled class,the traditional product writing method continued to be used.After the teaching experiment,the collected data were processed with SPSS 25.0 and Excel for analyses and discussions,and the results are as follows: 1)The summary writing performance of the students in the experimental class is significantly improved compared with that in the controlled class,which proves that the application of discourse analysis can enhance students’ summary writing scores.2)Discourse-analysis approach has different effects on the summary writing scores of students at different proficiency levels.In detail,students in the middle and low-proficiency groups have made greater progress than those in the high proficiency group.3)The results of questionnaires and interview show that students of different language proficiency levels hold a favorable attitude towards discourse-analysis approach for it helps deepen the understanding of the structure of the text and improve their ability of summary writing to a certain extent.This study confirms the effectiveness and feasibility of the application of discourse analysis theory to the teaching of English summary writing in senior high schools,and the results provide feasible teaching implications for senior high school English teachers.Therefore,this thesis is of both theoretical and practical significance.