Discourse Analysis Approach To English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

Discourse analysis approach emphasizes the specific context,structure and cohesion of the text.The application of discourse analysis approach plays an important role in improving students’ abilities of analysis and logical thinking,which conforms to the higher requirements of English reading teaching that are shown in The English Curriculum Standards for General High School(The 2020 revision version).Therefore,the study about how to apply the discourse analysis approach to the senior high school English reading teaching is a hot topic in the foreign language field.The study adopts a mixed research methodology combining quantitative research and qualitative research,taking 50 students in each of the two classes(one experimental class and one control class)from grade two in a senior high school in Nanchang City,Jiangxi Province as the experiment subjects,and the research was conducted for four months.The discourse analysis approach is applied to English reading teaching in the experimental class while the traditional reading teaching method is used in the control class.The comparison analysis between the results of the pre-test and the post-test is made to check whether the students’ reading performance in the experimental class is higher than that in the control class.Before the experiment and after the experiment,the students in the experimental class were surveyed by the questionnaire around the three aspects of pre-reading,while-reading and post-reading to study the changes of students’ reading strategies in experimental class.Finally,in order to further support the results of the tests and the questionnaire,six students in the experimental class were in-depth interviewed around their reading difficulties,reading abilities and reading strategies.It can be concluded that the application of discourse analysis approach to reading teaching can greatly improve students’ discourse awareness and reading performance.It is mainly reflected in two aspects.Firstly,after applying the discourse analysis approach to English reading teaching,students can better realize the reference and substitution in the discourse and it is helpful to improve their comprehension ability of the discourse.Secondly,students can predict the content and guess the meaning of new words through the context or background information.They are able to grasp the structure of the text,obtain the general idea,and understand the logical relationships between sentences and paragraphs by analyzing the characteristics of cohesion and coherence.The teaching implication of the study is that teachers should pay attention to strengthening students’ use of discourse analysis strategies,and it is necessary to adjust the reading teaching strategies according to the students’ practical situation.Teachers should also help students understand the characteristics of different discourse types in order to better understand the discourse and writing intention.