Teaching Of Reading At The Discourse Level In SEFC

Language is a tool for human communication. The aim of language teaching is to foster students' communicative competence by using the language. According to The Syllabus of Senior English for China, as this era of information demands that people read extensively and effectively, it is one of the major tasks of senior English teaching to improve the students' ability of reading comprehension. Consequently, it is the senior English teacher's task to employ effective teaching approaches to the reading class.This dissertation first makes a general survey of the present situation of Senior English for China (SEFC), pointing out that the traditional sentence-oriented approach is still dominant in today's reading class of SEFC. It then gives a brief introduction to the discourse-oriented approach and the theories-Schema theory and discourse analysis-that back up the approach. And then it explores the way to apply this approach to the reading class of SEFC. Next part is the report of the experiment with the two above-mentioned approaches and the results analysis. It comes to the conclusion that the discourse-oriented approach rather than the sentence-oriented approach should be adopted in the reading class of SEFC because the new approach makes the teaching more effective as it helps the students develop the language competence and the communicative competence simultaneously.