A Study Of College English Reading Teaching From The Perspective Of Macrostructure Theory

To foster students'reading comprehension ability is one of the objectives of English teaching in every level. Furthermore, students'reading competence is an important indicator of various English exams that test students'English language skills. In the past, people simply regarded reading as a process of decoding visual information; therefore, the reading lesson was mainly knowledge-based, in which teachers expect students could naturally improve their reading ability as they increased their language knowledge. However, this is not true. A universal problem"seeing the tree but not the forest'still exists in English learners of all levels in China. They only pay much attention to details and can not comprehend the significance of a text and catch the main idea of the whole text.In view of the current situation of reading teaching, the present paper intends to apply Van Dijk's macrostructure theory to illustrate the role of macro-rules in reading. The aim is to guide teachers to apply macro-rules to college English reading teaching so as to change students'poor ability of organizing the whole text and grasping the overall idea. Another aim is to raise teachers'awareness of applying theory to teaching, to a certain extent, to avoid the mismatch between theory and practice in teaching.In order to verify the effect of applying macrostructure theory to college English reading teaching, the author conducted an empirical research for a semester. 87 subjects of two intact classes majored in biotechnology and finance respectively at Yan'an University participated in the study. One class is of the control group; the other is of the experimental group. The students in experimental group are taught with macrostructure theory, while the control class remains unchanged and receives no treatment. Then the data collected by reading tests and a questionnaire are used to analyze and compare the advantages and disadvantages of the two teaching methods.The data shows that reading ability of the experimental class improves a lot obviously. This proves the feasibility of applying macrostructure theory to English reading teaching; it can offer students an effective way of grasping the whole text and improve their overall reading ability. Teachers should emphasize the role of macrostructure when having a detailed study of a text and raise students'text awareness in reading teaching.