| In foreign language learning, it has been long and commonly held that reading is crucial in improving learners' comprehensive language ability. No wonder that in senior school education reading is regarded as the focus and core of English teaching. However, things don't always turn out the way one wishes. The existing situation of senior reading teaching is that we get half the result with twice the effort. To a great extent, that correlative discourse theories haven't been applied to high school English teaching answers for the low efficiency and is the crux of our problem.According to foreign and domestic linguistic research results, although discourse analysis is a comparatively new field and there are still considerable gaps in our knowledge about it, some theories in the field such as schema, cohesion , etc are critically important in enhancing the readers' comprehension ability and improving their communicative competence. Since the theories prove to be of directive function for all kinds of language activities, there should be no exception for senior English reading teaching. Based on the belief, the present author sets out to make a study to prove the importance and necessity of applying discourse analysis theories to reading teaching, seek to find ways to combine the two in practice, and further attempts to explore effective ways to improve the students' reading comprehension ability.At first the author states the definition and main features of text, then reviews the historic background , main contents and current trends of discourse analysis . With certain examples she describes three main theories in the field, namely schema, cohesion and genre analysis patterns, and simultaneously she refers briefly to some theories of reading and three reading teaching modes abroad . After that the author makes a survey, analyzes the main factors which influence the students' readingcomprehension, and concludes that the lack of systematic direction of teaching and discourse theories accounts for our low efficiency in teaching. Based on the survey, the author puts forward the strategy of developing senior reading teaching with the guidance of discourse analysis theories. According to the strategy, the theories can facilitate reading comprehension in many aspects: Firstly, the activation of schemata helps people to link their background knowledge to a discourse; Secondly, the application of genre analysis approaches help students to master the macro-structure of a text better. Finally, the analysis of cohesive devices enables them to comprehend the logical connections between sentences better. Proceeding from the above study and discussion, the author makes experiments to test whether the application of such theories can improve senior English reading teaching in practice, and to what extent it is superior to traditional way of reading teaching. The present author adopts several methods to carry out the experiments, such as collecting materials, comparing different teaching modes, contrastive analysis and conclusion. She presents her teaching mode in five procedures, including first reading, text-structure analysis, cohesive devices analysis, second reading and language points explanation, and tasks aiming to improve comprehensive competence. At the same time the author emphasizes that by no means can the teaching mode violate the usual principles, such as syllabus and curriculum standard, teaching contents, step-by-step instruction, and suiting the instruction to the students' level. Simultaneously the focal points are also the new ideas that the author put forward in the dissertation since they constitute the crux in improving the students' reading comprehension ability through the combination of discourse analysis theories and classroom English teaching.After presenting and analyzing the results and data, the author argues that the adopted theories prove to be fruitful in enhancing students' reading comprehension ability, and states their far-reaching...
|
PDF Full Text Request