An Empirical Study On The Impact Of Discourse Analysis On English Reading Comprehension In Senior English Instruction

Both text and individuals influence text comprehension,one linguistic aspect of text that plays an important role in comprehension is cohesion and coherence,text pattern and context that produce knowledge demands on readers.The previous demands of challenging texts can be met by using discourse analysis to link text segments to together either explicit or implicitly.According to the analysis of current English reading teaching at high school,it can be found that the traditional reading teaching which puts more emphasis on the explanation of new words,translations and difficult sentences still exists,focusing less on processing the reading material by using the prior knowledge and by analyzing the logical relations among sentences and paragraphs from a holistic perspective to comprehend the reading passage thoroughly.Combining reading teaching with discourse analysis is proposed by many scholars.Discourse-based reading teaching stresses to improve students’ discourse awareness and regards the background knowledge,cohesive approaches,textual pattern and context in a discourse as the mediums to help readers process reading material integrally for reaching the purpose of comprehending the text.The study investigated the effects on text process comprehension.Through experiments,questionnaire and interview.The research focuses on the following questions:1.Can students’ reading habits be changed after applying discourse-based reading teaching method,compared with the traditional reading teaching?2.What is the effect of discourse analysis reading teaching on students’ English reading comprehension at senior school?In the research,the experiment lasts 14 weeks.The research participants are 105 students from two parallel classes,with 53 students in CC and 52 students in EC.During the research,traditional reading teaching treated is used in CC and the discourse-based reading teaching is employed in EC.This research instruments include questionnaire,experiment,interview.Based on the questionnaire consist of context,cohesion knowledge,and textual pattern.According to the post-questionnaire,after applying the discourse-based reading teaching,students’ English reading habit is improved compared with the CC.And in the post test,students’ mean score in the EC is increased by 9.8% and students in the EC outperform the students in the CC by 11.8%.In addition,the interview is implemented for verify the application devices that are used by English teachers in discourse-based reading teaching including the design of proper scene for the reading class,analysis of textual pattern and cohesive devices and helping students process discourse in context.This research verifies that the application of discourse analysis to reading teaching has positive influences on students’ general reading strategies and promote the students’ discourse awareness.At the same time,students’ reading proficiency is also improved greatly.