Application Of Discourse Analysis Theory To The Reading Teaching In Senior High School

Reading,as a crucial way to acquire knowledge and obtain information,plays an important role in language learning.In 2017,the Ministry of Education issued the New Standard of English Curriculum in General Senior High School(NECS)which put forward four core competencies of English subject in high school,namely,language ability,learning ability,cultural awareness,and thinking quality,among which discourse knowledge and other language knowledge were added to the connotation of language ability.Combining with the six elements of curriculum content put forward by NECS,discourse type,as one of them,aims to guide students to learn the discourses of different types and grasp the basic structures and linguistic features of different discourses.According to these requirements to English reading,teachers should guide students to lay emphasis on the various components of the discourse and help students to cultivate discourse awareness when teaching reading.However,under the guidance of traditional teaching methods such as grammar-translation method,during the actual teaching of reading tasks,many English teachers in senior high school pay more attention to intransententical problems rather than intersententical ones(Wu,2021),which obviously no longer meets the new requirements of students’ reading ability put forward by the NECS.Therefore,in view of the problems existing in practical teaching,this thesis tried to apply the discourse analysis theory to English reading teaching in senior high school.Compared with the conventional reading comprehension,the SOFB reading which was proposed by the National Educational Examinations Authority(NEEA)in 2007 can better test participants’ discourse competence,so,the thesis made a study on the effect of applying discourse analysis theory to English reading teaching in senior high school based on SOFB reading,aiming to answer the following two questions:1.What are the effects of applying discourse analysis theory to SOFB reading teaching on participants’ reading achievements in SOFB?2.What are the effects of applying discourse analysis theory to SOFB reading teaching on participants’ discourse awareness?The subjects of experiment were selected from two parallel classes of senior three in one of senior high schools in Wushan County,Gansu Province and there are 40 students in each class.The research instruments used for collecting data are two test papers and one questionnaire(used for twice).At the beginning of the experiment,a pre-questionnaire and a pretest were conducted respectively to check whether the students’ reading achievements in SOFB of two classes were similar and their discourse awareness was at the same level or not.During the experiment,the author applied the discourse analysis theory to SOFB reading teaching in EC while did not systematically input the new relevant knowledge of the discourse analysis theory to the students in CC.Except for that,all the other variables such as experimental period and teaching materials were the same for the two classes.At the end of the experiment,a post-test and post-questionnaire were done to testify whether students’ reading achievements in SOFB reading and discourse awareness have improved through the experiment or not.The experiment lasted for12 weeks and all the data were analyzed by SPSS 25.0.Based on the analysis of the data collected in the questionnaire and two tests,the author concluded:(1)after a period of teaching,the students’ reading achievements in SOFB of both EC and CC have improved,but the reading achievements of EC improved more significantly than CC,which shows that the application of the discourse analysis theory to SOFB reading teaching in senior high school has a positive effect on improving students’ SOFB reading achievements.(2)The results of the questionnaire show that after the experiment,students in EC were more familiar with discourse knowledge and used discourse analysis methods more frequently when finishing SOFB reading tasks,which shows the application of discourse analysis theory to SOFB reading teaching has a positive impact on cultivating students’ discourse awareness.In addition,the author also puts forward targeted pedagogical suggestions on the application of discourse analysis theory to SOFB reading teaching in senior high school,aiming to be able to provide some referential value for the subsequent researches.