| In Chinese college, most English reading classes are influenced deeply by the traditional teaching method which over-emphasizes language itself at the price of fostering their dependence on the teacher and does not help much in guiding students to be competent readers. Discourse analysis holds much promise in reading teaching from a different perspective. Discourse analysis is a method of linguistic analysis, which seeks to reveal the relationships between sentences, and espacially the relationships between sentences and paragraphs. The point is to help people better analyse a text with making clear the underlying coherence. It heavily draws on the notions and methods associated with the systemic-functional linguistics developed by Halliday. This thesis mainly studies the feasibility and advantages of the application of discourse analysis into instruction of English reading.An empirical study are designed by the author. The subjects are non-English majors of three classes of grade one in Northwest Normal University, who are defined as a control class (science class) with 47 students and two experimental classes (one art class with 35 students and one science class with 60 students). The author attempts to analyze the same texts in the three classes by adopting two kinds of teaching methods. The teacher uses traditional teaching method in the control class. For the experiment classes, the teacher adopts approaches based on discourse analysis: the teacher presents discourse information to students from certain pionts of coherence, and give them some training about the application of the DA theories. In addition, before the tests, the author conducts a questionnaire and an interview in the classes to learn about the students'English reading ability. The author mainly compares the effects of the two teaching methods by means of tests. The whole experiment lasts for 10 weeks. During the experiment, there are a pretest, a midtest, and a posttest with the same difficulty level are given to all 3 classes to compare their reading performance in a dynamic way. The results of the tests are analysed by SPSS.The results indicate that, guided by discourse theories, in the two experiment classes, the art class has a significant improvement, while the improvement of the science class is not significant. The control class (science class) also has a insignificant improvement, but it's less significant than that of the art class. In both experiment classes, female students have a bigger improvement, whereas the difference is very obvious in the art class, but very insignificant in the science class.By the analysis of the statistics, the study showed three major findings. Firstly, the reading instruction method based on discourse analysis theories can better improve students'reading comprehension compared with traditional one. Secondly, to some degree, discourse reading teaching is more effective to art students than science students. And thirdly, in a certain degree, it is more effective to female students than male students.At last the author concludes that this thesis has a significance to college English reading instruction in China, presents some pedagogical implications and suggestions from the perspective of discourse analysis. However, due to the limitations of this study, there is still room for further research.
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