On Effective Application Of Discourse Analysis To The Teaching Of Reading Comprehension In A High School

Traditional English reading teaching usually focuses more on explaining words, phrases or sentences one by one. Such teaching method destroys the understanding of the whole reading material as discourse and causes some problems in developing students' reading ability so that students only tend to grasp words or phrases separately rather than reference of the author' attitude, the general idea and inferences of reading materials.Since the enforcement of the New Curricular Standard of English for Chinese Senior Middle School Students (2003), which aims at developing the students' integrating skills in using the language, the traditional teaching method has been regarded by more and more people as not meeting the requirements in reading teaching. To satisfy the requirements, the mode of traditional English reading teaching should be reformed and a new reading mode based on discourse analysis will prevail in the English reading teaching for the belief that by means of analyzing the title, the structure and background of the text, the students can better understand the theme of the text and fully develop the reading competence.Based on the survey conducted in my school, this thesis has found that students really have much difficulty in understanding the passages when reading. First of all, lacking some required words, sentence structure and grammar,they suffer a lot while reading. Besides, their poor reading skills also prevent them from improving their reading comprehension,especially when they are incapable of analyzing the discourse of passages, which is an obstacle to fully understand the passages.Finally,inefficient reading lead to the loss of interest in reading English.In order to overcome the disadvantages and improve their reading comprehension, this thesis has applied the classical reading theory of reading-discourse-analysis model in the teaching of English reading for senior middle school students, trying to prove the good effect of the proposed teaching mode.This study has carried out an experiment in two classes, of which one is experimental class, and the other is for contrast. In the experimental class, the discourse-analysis teaching method is applied, while in the contrastive class traditional teaching method is used. After one term, I examine the students in the two classes and get the result:the achievements of the experimental class are obviously better than those of the contrastive class. Therefore, a conclusion is drawn after a systematic analysis:The new teaching method of reading-discourse-analysis method is better for improving students' reading interest and reading ability than the traditional method. Also, it does good to improve students' creativity. However, because of the small number of the students participating in the experiment, the data and the result of the analysis are very much limited to some extent.