The Application Of Discourse Analysis Theory To Texts Teaching Of Advanced English

"Advanced English"is a compulsory course of English majors at senior stage and aims at the further training of the third-year English majors'comprehensive competence as well as cultivating of their linguistic competence and communicative competence. In recent years Book 5 and Book 6 of Contemporary College English by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press are widely used for the third-year English majors as text-books in some colleges and universities. Since texts are the most essential parts, great importance is attached to texts analyzing and teaching. For a long time the traditional teaching method which is concerned with words meaning, sentence structure, and grammar knowledge is extraordinary influential in texts teaching. Texts'teaching of Advanced English makes no exception. However, texts are conveyed by the form of written discourse. Therefore texts analysis should be on the basis of discourse instead of the analysis of words, sentences or grammar, so is the texts analysis of Advanced English. If the teacher is unaware of the application of Discourse Analysis Theory to teaching practice, the teacher will fail to guide and to help the third-year students to improve their comprehensive competence, let alone to cultivate their communicative competence.From 5-year teaching practice and the study of the knowledge of Discourse Analysis theory, the author comes up with a new teaching formula—the application of Discourse Analysis Theory to texts teaching of Advanced English so as to regulate teachers texts instruction and help students with the consciousness of discourse analysis, moreover to improve their comprehensive competence. How to apply Discourse Analysis Theory to texts teaching of Advanced English effectively is well illustrated by the analysis of specific texts. The steps are in the followings: in the first place, the teacher should help students construct the concept of contextual analysis of Discourse Analysis Theory in Lead-in process; in the second place, the teacher should help them activate textual-patterns analysis, cohesion analysis, coherence analysis of the theory in Detailed discussion process, last but not least the teacher should help them to integrate the knowledge of Discourse Analysis Theory when they are assigned to write summaries of texts.Then to make it convincing, the author presents post-questionnaire as well as a report of an experiment on the application of Discourse Analysis in the teaching of texts for the third-year English majors to testify its effectiveness. Finally,the thesis summarizes findings obtained from SPSS data analysis demonstrating that the application of discourse analysis in Advanced English texts teaching plays an positive role in texts comprehension and is an effective way to improve their English comprehensive competence as well as their communicative competence. So it is of significance to combine discourse analysis and the texts teaching of Advanced English.