A Study Of Factors Affecting Students’ Comprehension In English Reading Teaching In Senior High Schools From The Perspective Of Discourse Analysis

Reading teaching is a significant part of English teaching in the senior high school.It is the main field for students to learn discourse knowledge and improve their discourse awareness.Students’ comprehensible input and flexible output of language are the ideal state of English reading teaching.However,in the actual reading teaching,teachers attach great importance to explaining vocabulary and sentence patterns,which separates the whole discourse.As a result,student’s reading level stagnates,and they are unable to cultivate their subject core literacy and higher-level thinking ability,thus failing to meet the requirements of education reform.Therefore,this paper applies the discourse analysis to English reading teaching in senior high schools in the hope of improving teaching,cultivating students’ discourse analysis abilities and improving reading strategies,and thus improving their reading comprehension abilities.Based on discourse analysis theory,this study adopts the questionnaire survey method and the teaching experimental method,and takes English reading test of Senior One students and questionnaires of the students and teachers as research tools.From September 2021 to November 2021,an empirical study was conducted on the Senior High School in Fujian Province.Ninety-eight students from Senior One and thirty-eight English teachers in the school were chosen as the study subjects.Class Six is the experimental class in which the author adopts the discourse analysis teaching method,while Class Five is the controlled class where the author adopts the traditional grammar translation teaching method.The study is aimed at figuring out the following three questions: 1)What is the present situation of English teachers in a high school in Fuzhou applying discourse analysis to guide reading teaching? 2)Based on discourse analysis,what factors do affect students’ English reading comprehension? 3)Can English reading teaching based on discourse analysis improve students’ English reading performance?Based on the analysis of the teaching experiment and the questionnaires results,the following conclusions are drawn: Firstly,under the guidance of discourse analysis,the main factors affecting senior high school students’ English reading are as follows: long and difficult sentences,grammatical knowledge including the syntax and morphology,lexical reiteration and collocation,author’s writing attitude and intention,and non linguistic factors such as students’ reading interest,emotions and states during reading.In addition,text knowledge such as cohesion and coherence,cultural background knowledge,text pattern and text structure also affect students’ English reading to varying degrees.Secondly,discourse analysis teaching can improve students’ English reading comprehension competence and reading level.The experimental results of the study indicates that the English reading ability of the students in the experimental class and the control class is similar at the early stage of the teaching experiment.After three months of the teaching experiment,the reading performance of the subjects in the experimental class has been significantly improved.Based on the above findings and related theoretical basis,the author puts forward some suggestions on practical reading teaching and the application of discourse analysis in teaching,hoping that these suggestions can enhance teachers’ professional quality and improve students’ reading comprehension capacity.