The Exploration On Improving Students' Discourse Reading Ability

This dissertation focuses on the application of discourse analysis and aims at introducing the text approach-teaching EFL reading with discourse analysis. While reading, what readers face directly is discourse, whose information and the regular patterns are keys to reading comprehension. Thus, there is a need to establish discourse analysis in reading instruction. Discourse is the spoken or written language unit in practice, and the language entirety made up of a series of continuous utterances or sentences in the process of communication. Cohesion, coherence and thematic structure are important discourse construction devices for textuality across the sentences of a discourse. The basic approaches to reading comprehension dependent on the discourse analysis cover understanding the context, using the knowledge of the world, recognizing thematisation and thematic structure, tracing textual patterns as well as making inferences and recognizing implications.In order to overcome the drawback in the traditional reading instruction in China, it is necessary to employ discourse analysis in EFL reading instruction and develop text approach in high schools. The text approach means to encourage students to read a text as a whole, get the writer's message, understand the text structure and contents, draw important and meaningful information as much as possible from the text and create overall and deep comprehension on the basis of discourse analysis. The paper presents and illustrates a model of text approach involving detailed teaching process and strategies, which are mainly based on SEFC textbook as examples. In order to testify the effect and feasibility of the text approach, a comparative experiment between the traditional reading instruction and text approach was conducted. The result of the experiment proves that this approach is practicable and efficient Discourse analysis in reading can help to develop students' competence in comprehending, analyzing and obtaining overall information in a discourse. The application of the text approach in practice is helpful in effectively enhancing students' discourse reading ability and level, and consequently, promoting the improvement of their communicative competence.