The Application Of Discourse Analysis In Reading Teaching

In the age of information, it is still the case that most people rely on reading to gain information and expand knowledge. Therefore, how to effectively improve students'reading ability is given much attention by more and more linguists and foreign language teachers. In the traditional teaching,reading,which puts emphasis on the accumulation of knowledge,is regarded as a passive process of decoding, ignoring the communicative and autonomy learning ability. Since 1970s, a new perspective of analyzing language has been applied to language teaching—discourse analysis.Discourse analysis becomes a leading discipline and mainly studies language in use. The structure characteristics reflected by discourse analysis undoubtedly provides some implication for language teaching. The present study researches on the effect of application of discourse analysis in reading teaching and tries to probe into the following questions:(1) Whether the students'reading ability can be improved through the application of discourse analysis in reading teaching?(2)Whether the discourse analysis awareness can be fostered through this teaching method?(3) How is the autonomy learning ability of students under this teaching method?The present study first introduces the knowledge of reading and discourse analysis. Then hypothesis about whether the application of discourse analysis in reading teaching can significantly improve students'reading ability are made. Therefore, an experiment is conducted to test the hypothesis, which consists of three parts: pretest, experimentation and posttest. The participants are freshmen of non-English majors of Xiangfan University in Hubei province. In the process of the experimentation, the traditional method is used by the control group, while discourse-oriented teaching method by the experimental group. And the data collected from the pretest and posttest are comparatively analyzed by SPSS 15.0 for windows.The results demonstrates that the discourse-oriented reading teaching method can greatly improve students'reading ability, foster the discourse awareness and cultivate autonomy learning, which exert a significant influence on language teaching. Moreover, the function of the teacher in reading teaching should not be overlooked who plays various roles like controller, organizer, psychologist and resource providers, and diversified class activities should be adopted to develop students'comprehensive ability. Besides, the teacher should form a habit of reflective teaching and promote continuing self-development.The study is concluded by summarizing the major findings, pointing out the limitations and suggestions for future research.