Discourse Analysis Theories Applied To English Reading Teaching In Senior High Schools

Since the new National English Curricula Standard for senior high schools was implemented in 2003, the English teaching goals have paid much more attention to the development of students'understanding abilities, discourse competence and application of comprehensive knowledge. According to the goals set by the English Curricula Standard for senior high school students, the higher level of reading comprehension must has been taken and it needs students to be able to grasp the whole discourse structure of a text, and then to attain the useful information when necessary. But the traditional language teaching has largely concentrated on words, grammar and sentence structures, so they are incompetent at understanding of the whole discourse. From this perspective, because of the new ideology that emphasizes on the development of students'discourse competence, discourse analysis teaching is becoming the bridge between the students'real mastered situation and the current teaching aims (Chen Li, 2006).This thesis aims to verify that discourse analysis teaching can be integrated as a positive teaching method by raising students discourse awareness and developing their discourse competence effectively and efficiently.This thesis is divided into five parts:The first part begins to introduce the importance of English reading teaching. According to the analysis of current situation in the college entrance examination and problems of reading teaching in senior high schools, the author proposes the application of discourse analysis theories in reading class in order to improve students'abilities of reading comprehension.The second part elaborates on the relative theoretical definition of discourse and the main contents of discourse analysis:cohesion, coherence and genre analysis. Besides, this thesis also explores the detailed reasons for introducing discourse analysis method into English reading teaching.The third part is the research methodology. In the research, two classes of grade one from Tianjin Fifty-fifth Middle School were chosen as the subjects. Each class consisted of 50 students, one as a control group and the other as the experimental group. Both classes are at the same English level and have the same teacher. The discourse analysis method was adopted during the experimental class while the traditional method was utilized as usual in the control class. The author conducted one term experiment, by pre-test and post-test, two kinds of questionnaire surveys and the collection of a qualitative data complement.The fourth part presents the results of the statistical analysis of the data collection for the research questions and detailed discussion on each research question.The fifth part is the conclusion of this thesis. The discourse analysis plays an effective role in the English reading teaching in senior high schools. Of course its intrinsic limitations are needed to improve in the reading teaching process by our middle school teachers.