Systemic Functional Grammar And The Teaching Of EFL Reading--From Its Textual Metafunctional And Contextual Perspectives

Reading teaching has always been an important component of the EFL teaching in China. But unfortunately, for the past decades the reading teaching has been unsatisfactory due to many factors. And the teaching approach is a very important factor. The traditional EFL reading teaching approach is mainly atomistic and form-oriented and the reading teaching only stays at the sentence level. What's worse, during the reading activities in the classroom, both the teachers and students themselves view students as passive participants. In view of the weak points of the traditional teaching approach, this thesis tries to explore a more effective teaching approach to the EFL reading, that is, to teach EFL reading in a systemic functional perspective.Firstly, the problem of the teaching of the EFL reading is proposed in this thesis. Then in chapter two, the thesis analyzes the nature of reading process. It's well-known that the basic purpose of reading is to get message or information. In order to get the message intended and the writer's intention, only having the language knowledge is quite insufficient. Sometimes other factors, such as the cultural knowledge, the reader's experience and the situational information can play a determining role in the interpretation of a reading material. Not only the reader and the text but the writer and the ways thoughts are conveyed and the contextual factors are taken into consideration in the analysis of the reading process. Based on the analysis the thesis identifies what an effective reader is. In chapter three and chapter four, an overview of the systemic functional grammar and its application to the EFL reading teaching are discussed. The systemic functional grammar views language as social semiotic and interprets language and meaning from social perspective, focusing on the "meaning potential" of language other than its form. Moreover, it regards "text" as a semantic unit and the basic unit of meaning. It is due to this that the systemic functional grammar is of significance to the teaching of EFL reading. A fair amount of space has been given to discussing and illustrating respectively how the three textual components (the thematic structure, the information structure and cohesion) and the three types of context (the linguistic context, the situational context and the cultural context) can be applied to the EFL reading teaching. At last, adopting an Experiment & Control Groups Pretest-Posttest design methodology, this study undertakes an experiment. The results show that teaching EFL reading in this approach can greatly improve students' reading comprehension competence.