Context Theories And The Teaching Of English Reading

With the development of linguistics, context study is gaining a more and more important position. Its study has been widely carried out in linguistics'various branches: Pragmatics, Semantics, Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics, Psycholinguistics, Functional Linguistics, and Computer Linguistics and so on. Context plays an important role not only in linguistics but also in many other disciplinary subjects as well.After reviewing the history of context development, the thesis illustrates various context theories, analyses its classification and features, and then sums up the roles that context plays in the teaching of English reading. Thus suggest establishing Context Reference Framework and introducing it into the classroom reading activity.Simply speaking, Context Reference Framework is one where different contexts are put into use in the teaching of English reading. That is to say, different contexts will be put into consideration in reading so as to improve comprehension. Combing them with the study of College English, and adopting the way of text demonstration, the thesis talks about the perceived or foregrounding (by borrowing the term from stylistics) role of each context. With the teaching of reading as the background, the perceived or foregrounding parts mean ones that are helpful for the improvement of reading. For example, we may employ Linguistic Context to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words in our reading, to make sure ambiguity, to infer the implications, or to get the exact meaning of the words or phrases; make use of Deictic Context to find out what the reference is and understand how the cohesion is achieved; employ Context of Situation to make sure the appropriateness in content, the appropriateness in form, and the appropriateness in formality; make use of the Common /Mutual knowledge or Background Knowledge to actuate students with the given or new schema ; make use of Cognitive Environment to predict the main idea by looking at the ostensive places( such as the title of the passage, the topic sentence in a paragraph, and the beginning and concluding parts),or the ostensive devices (like the transitional words )to follow the author's thought, hence improving the reading efficiency; and make use of Communicative Context to call for the students'active communications with the discourse so as to get the information, and also provide the students with more chances for practice and promote their communicative abilities in the form of discussion, debate and oral presentation. Thus the student's consciousness of active participating is evoked.With the results of a test and questionnaire to testify the effectiveness of Context Reference Framework, one can find it helpful for improving the reading comprehension. Despite of some...