| Appraisal theory, also called Appraisal system is a new framework of studying the evaluative resources in discourses. Its range covers all evaluative uses of language, including those by which speakers/writers adopt particular value positions or stances and by which they negotiate these stances with either actual or potential respondents. Appraisal theory consists of three basic systems: Attitude, Graduation and Engagement. Since its birth, Appraisal Theory has been applied in many texts of different genres and types. This thesis attempts to apply it into a new domain that it has never set foot on----teaching of Business English Reading.Business English Reading and Appreciation is a course which requires Appreciative reading comprehension. And there is a textbook which has been used as supplementary reading materials which consist of 16 speeches made by CEOS or presidents from different world famous multi-national companies. This book has been used as an extensive reading material. The teacher asked students to preview before class and in class the main focus was on solving grammatical and lexical points and translating points that were hard to students. In can be seen from the author's teaching experience at North West Minorities University, the students'comprehension has been on the literal comprehending level which focused on the language and grammatical points. The class was teacher-centered which used the traditional grammar translation teaching method. And the students just passively accepted the meanings that the teacher and the texts conveyed without active and critical thinking.In order to improve the teaching of this course, this thesis attempts to apply Appraisal theory into teaching of Business English Reading and Appreciation course. In considering the special features of the teaching materials, this thesis adopted Genre analysis to analyze the macro-structure of the texts and the major focus was on helping students to find out the evaluative resources in the texts using Appraisal theory. And then the students were asked to present their own views to evaluate the texts in order to train the critical reading ability of the students.In this thesis 30 students who had already passed TEM4 were selected as experimental subjects and they were randomly divided into 2 groups, one was the experimental group (EG) and the other was the control group (CG). The two groups were treated in two different ways in 16 weeks. The EG was treated in a Genre plus Appraisal way and the CG was treated in the traditional way. This thesis, using"pretest-posttest group design"and SPSS (12.0) as statistical tool of analyzing data, compared the pretest and posttest sores of two groups and found that applying Appraisal theory to the teaching of business English reading was helpful in improving the students'reading ability.The result of this experiment puts new and higher requirements to the reorientation of the teacher's role and the teaching method adopted in class. And through the teaching experiment, this thesis analyzes the evaluative resources in the business English addresses both quantitatively and qualitatively. And the findings may be of referential help to the preparation of the class and in doing research in business English addresses.The numbers of the experimental subjects are a little bit small and the teaching materials are too single. This may restrict the generality of the research results and further researches are expected.
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