An Experimental Study On The Effect Of Discourse-based Approach On Senior High School Students’ English Reading Skills

National English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School（2017 edition,revised in 2020）lists text types as one of the six elements of curriculum content,advocating teachers paying close attention to students’acquisition of discourse knowledge and their development of discourse awareness in reading teaching.Nevertheless,current English reading teaching in senior high school puts stress on the explanation of linguistic knowledge such as word usages,grammatical rules,sentence patterns and so on,seriously ignoring students’understanding of discourse,discourse knowledge and discourse meaning.Among the trial endeavors,Discourse-based Approach comes into sight.This teaching mode,combining discourse analysis and language teaching,emphasizes that teachers should rely on discourse in teaching and guide students to grasp the macro-structural and the micro-structural properties of discourse,so as to help them have a global and deep understanding of it.In view of this,it is significant for the present researcher to explore the applicability of Discourse-based Approach to English reading teaching in senior high school.Based on Schema Theory,Cohesion Theory and Discourse Patterns,this study puts forward five steps of Discourse-based Approach:pre-reading,read for macro discourse structure,read for micro discourse structure,read for discourse meaning and post-reading.With the application of Discourse-based Approach to English reading teaching in senior high school,this study attempts to discover the effect of this teaching mode on students’reading skills of understanding the main idea,inferring word meaning and reasoning for judgement.This experimental study is implemented through three months,in which 91 11^thgraders from two parallel classes of a senior high school in Shijiazhuang of Hebei Province are chosen as research subjects.There are 46 students in the experimental class and the number of students in the control class is 45.During the experiment,Discourse-based Approach is adopted in the experimental class while the bottom-up teaching model is conducted in the control class.The research instruments comprise tests and an interview,with which the three reading skills of students and the viewpoints of students of different levels in the experimental class on this teaching mode are investigated respectively.After collecting the scores of the pre-test and the post-test,the author makes use of SPSS 26.0 to conduct data analyses to test significant differences.Besides,the author analyzes the results of the interview to further probe into the availability of Discourse-based Approach in English reading teaching in senior high school.This study proves that students’three reading skills are improved with Discourse-based Approach.Firstly,students’reading skill of understanding the main idea is enhanced significantly under the guidance of Discourse-based Approach.Specifically,students’progress in summarizing the title is greater by comparison with that in grasping the gist of the passage.Secondly,students’reading skill of inferring word meaning is ameliorated with Discourse-based Approach.Lastly,Discourse-based Approach conduces to students’improvement in the reading skill of reasoning for judgement.To be exact,compared with students’improvement in reasoning for judgement of the author’s intention and in reasoning for judgement of the author’s viewpoint,their improvement in reasoning for judgement of details is the most noticeable.It is hoped that this study can provide practical reference and constructive suggestions for Discourse-based Approach to be used in English reading teaching in senior high school.