Application Of A Discourse-analytic Teaching Model In The Teaching Of English Reading In Vocational And Technical Colleges

In English learning, reading, as one of the four basic English skills, is the main source of language input and accumulation. It plays a significant role in developing students' linguistic competence. So English reading teaching has always occupied a very important position in English teaching.Nowadays, teachers have still used the traditional reading teaching model in the Vocational and Technical College English reading teaching. This teaching model mainly stresses on vocabulary and grammar and only stays at the sentence level. Teachers explain new words, phrases, sentence structures and translate sentences'meaning in isolation. Although students can master amounts of vocabulary and grammar knowledge, they are unable to grasp the macrostructure of the text and unable to understand the writer's ture writing intention, thus their reading accuracy is rather low. This is the main reason why in Vocational and Technical Colleges, most students' English reading level is relatively low. Therefore, to find out a reading teaching model which can more efficiently and effectively improve the English reading competence of Vocational and Technical College students has become a very important problem which needs to be solved as soon as possible.As a matter of fact, the process of efficient reading should be a kind of interaction between writers and readers which must be achieved through the discourse. Discourse analysis, introduced into China in 1980s, is the scientific study of language in use which deals with supra-sentential linguistic units. It includes a series of important theories such as textual patterns, cohesion, coherence and theme-rheme, etc. It emphasizes that in the process of reading, we should pay much attention to analyzing and grasping the text on the whole so that we can understand the writer's real writing intention. Thus we can make good use of the clues provided by the writer to predict the writer's writing strategies and understand the information conveyed by the writer. As a result, the accuracy of reading will be increased effectively. So discourse analysis provides a powerfully theoretical basis and a new angle of vision for Chinese English teachers to efficiently and effectively enhance students' English reading competence.In China, many linguists and English teachers have been studying reading from the discourse-analytic perspective for more than 20 years. However, these studies have always paid more attention to the theories instead of teaching practice and they have been mainly concerned with high school students and university students. Few of them have been specially concerned with Vocational and Technical Colleges students.Therefore, the aim of this dissertation is to apply discourse analysis to the English reading teaching practice of Vocational and Technical Colleges and thereby to provide a more efficient and effective reading teaching model for the teaching of English reading in Vocational and Technical Colleges, that is, the discourse-analytic teaching model.In order to demonstrate that the discourse-analytic teaching model is indeed more efficient and effective than the traditional reading teaching model in improving the Vocational and Technical College students' English reading competence, an experimental study is carried out. The experiment includes two tests:pretest and posttest. In the experiment, the author describes the specific teaching steps of the traditional reading teaching model and the discourse-analytic teaching model separately by taking one reading sample. Through the analysis of the data we get in the pretest and posttest by the statistical software SPSS 10.0, as well as the comparison of the average reading speed, excellent rate and passing rate between EG and CG in the pretest and posttest, we draw the conclusion that compared with the traditional reading teaching model, the discourse-analytic teaching model can more efficiently and effectively improve the Vocational and Technical College students' English reading competence.Based on this conclusion, the author analyzes the pedagogical implications of the present study including the feasibility of applying the discourse-analytic teaching model to English reading teaching in Vocational and Technical Colleges and some specific teaching strategies.In addition, the author also points out the limitations of the present study and puts forward some suggestions for future researches.