On Appliation Of Discourse Pattern In Reading Teaching Of TVUs

Cultivating the reading comprehension of students is one of the goals of English education in China. Further more, testing reading comprehension serves as the most important item to inspect the students' English level. We used to think reading as a decoding process only on the visual information, so our English reading course mainly emphasized the teaching of language knowledge. Teachers count on that students' developing reading comprehension can be achieved by increasing their language knowledge. However, that is not the case. English learners of different levels in our country have the same difficulty in understanding the main idea of the text and stress emphasis on the understanding of words and sentences while neglecting the thesis of the whole text. To work out the solution to this problem, this paper aims at introducing the theory of discourse pattern into reading teaching class in order to improve the students' reading comprehension.This paper first gives the definition of "reading", "reading comprehension", "discourse" and "discourse pattern". It states the relationships between "reading comprehension" and "discourse pattern" as well. Following that, it introduces the foreign scholars researching in English discourse—four main kinds of discourse patterns with their structures and features. Then it analyzes the suggestions we can get from the theory. That is, it is necessary for Chinese students to master consciously the English discourse pattern and it can help them practice the advanced reading skill and efficient reading methods. At the same time, to help students master English discourse we should combine the teaching of English discourse pattern theory with practices matching with it.In order to get the information of how to introduce the theory of discourse pattern into TVU's English reading class, the author made a detailed survey on the reading teaching situation of the whole Hang-gang TVU system. In chapter 3, the author reveals the problems and analyzes its reasons.The emphasized part of the paper lies in chapter 2 and chapter 4. Chapter 2 mainly tells us the relationship between reading comprehension and discourse pattern theory and foreign scholars' research on the theory. It also shows us the structure and feature of each type of discourse pattern through case study. Chapter 4 gives some suggestions on how to introduce the theory into reading teaching based on the finding outs of the survey in chapter 3. Since it is difficult for Chinese students to summarize the English discourse pattern by themselves only through practice, we, as English teachers, should try our best to introduce the related linguistic knowledge. Based on the author's teaching experience, the paper gives three ways to achieve the goal. The first way is to teach the theory to the students; the second is to practice the theory with some typical examples; the third is to generalize the pattern marks which can help the students to identify what kind of discourse pattern is in the text. According to the author, the three ways are effective in reading class. The experiment in chapter 5 also proves that introducing the theory in TVU's reading class can help the students improve their reading comprehension.Through the experiment, we find out that there is no way to teach reading only with discourse analysis because the TVU students have much lower language abilities than those of high institutes, which is the main reason that causes them unable to understand and accept the advanced linguistic theories. Another important discovery of the experiment is that: for the first year students, the new teaching method takes no more advantages than the traditional approach; while for the second year students, the advantage of the new method is obvious, compared with the traditional approach. As we have mentioned above, the students have too bad language ability to understand the theories of modern linguistics; while the second year students have received systematic study in English that enables them to accept the theories and applies them to practical reading. This reminds us that we should not adopt the advanced linguistic theories in reading teaching blindly in such a special environment; we should adopt proper teaching methods according to the students' reality. In my view, we should combine the teaching of English discourse pattern theory with the traditional methods. Based on the theory of discourse, the teacher should first let the students understand the text in a macro way, try to find out the author's thought of developing the text; then make analysis on the difficult sentences so that they can get a fully understanding of the whole text. Therefore, we can achieve the goal of reading teaching—to improve the students' reading comprehension.