An Action Research On Developing Senior High School Students’ English Reading Abilities Through Discourse Analysis

Reading is one of the most important ways for learners to input language.The improvement of students’ reading ability is closely related to their comprehension of the texts they read.However,under the guidance of the current teaching methods of reading,students pay more attention to the learning of language knowledge and grammatical structure when reading passages,but ignore the in-depth understanding and analysis of passages.Reading the literature,it is discovered that the method of discourse analysis is to conduct an in-depth analysis of reading texts from both macro and micro perspectives,which aids readers in comprehending the passage’s content deeply.Therefore,researcher tried to use discourse analysis in reading teaching to improve students’ reading ability.This study takes 40 students from Grade two of a senior high school in Shenyang as the research subject.By using the method of action research,this study mainly studies the following questions:（1）What are the problems in senior high school students’ English reading abilities?（2）What are the ways of applying discourse analysis to reading teaching in senior high school?（3）What are the effects of discourse analysis in reading teaching on senior high school students’ reading abilities?The action research lasted three months and consisted of two rounds.In each round of action research,discourse analysis is applied to reading teaching.Researcher used questionnaire,test and interview to collect data,and conducted quantitative and qualitative analysis of these data respectively.The following findings are drawn from the analysis of the research data: the students’ ability to understand and analyze the passage by using the corresponding discourse knowledge is poor.Teachers should focus on assisting students to conduct in-depth analyses of reading passages and supplementing relevant discourse knowledge for students when teaching reading.Applying discourse analysis in reading teaching can significantly improve students’ reading ability,among which analytical ability is the most obvious.After analysis,this study confirmed that the application of discourse analysis can effectively improve students’ reading ability,which can be used as a good reference for English reading teaching in senior high school.