The Application Of Discourse Analysis In English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

Discourse is natural spoken or written language in context, especially when complete texts are being considered. For an English-learner, it would be difficult to write a well-structured paper if (s)he did not have a good knowledge of discourse, even with a good command of vocabulary and grammar. However, the cultivation of discourse competence has not been taken seriously in high schools in China. Writing teaching is mostly in the level of sentences instead of discourse level. How to change the situation in writing teaching is just one of the main problems we English teachers have to encounter in high schools. In this paper, the writer of the paper analyzes the effect of discourse analysis on the English writing teaching in high school and gives a mode of writing training based on discourse analysis to improve students writing.Firstly, the paper analyzes the situation of English writing teaching in high schools in China. Writing is neither much valued nor taught in an appropriate method in high schools. As a result, there exist many problems in the logic organization of ideas and the structure and so on in the students' writing. With consideration of these problems and of the demand of English writing in the New English Course Syllabus as well as current research results on this topic, we suggest that the method discourse analysis be utilized to guide English writing teaching in high school in China.Secondly, the theory about discourse analysis relevant to English writing is briefly introduced, such as the concept of discourse and discourse analysis. Although more and more attention on discourse analysis has been paid so far, the approaches are widely divergent due to different purposes to analyze the discourse of an essay. We suggest that the discourse analysis be classified into two levels (aspects): analysis of logic organization of an essay, and grammatical device, lexical cohesion and logical connection analysis of sentences consisting of a paragraph in an essay. Some samples from the high school English textbooks (mainly Vol .3.) are provided for the purpose of illustration.Then this paper goes on to analyze the relationship between the theory of discourse analysis and English writing teaching. We suggest that the theory of discourse analysis be a prerequisite to more advanced English writing teaching and practice. The discourse analysis contributes a lot to training in English writing skills, especially in organization of the entire essay, cohesion between sentences as well as diction, and so on. Therefore, we offers a mode of English writing based on discourse analysis which has three steps: pre-writing, writing and post-writing. The pre-writing involves making sure what to write, how to organize and then list an outline; the writing includes sorting out vocabulary, making proper sentences and extending paragraphs instead of traditionally making sentences; and the post-writing process denotes modification of drafts, that is to say that students will focus more on their drafts from the perspective of the discourse rather than amend simply grammar, punctuation and spelling errors. With a combination of the theory of discourse analysis with the practice of English writing in high school, some strategies in writing training are put forward: 1) to find the typical samples for students to imitate; and 2) to shorten a given essay. The writing-imitating practice involves paragraph-imitated and essay-imitating writing. The former requires students to learn how to write a topic sentence and extend a paragraph by imitating the given samples; the latter requires students to imitate the type of the discourse of the given samples and learn how to organize paragraphs for their own essay writing. As for the shortening of the given essay, students are asked to give concisely a description of the main ideas of a long article. In this paper, we give some of samples for teachers to handle it in English writing teaching.To further elucidate the applicability of discourse analysis theory to English writing teaching in high...