Discourse Analysis In Reading Instruction: Introducing Discourse Analysis To The Reading Class

The traditional English teaching aims at cultivation and accumulation of knowledge. Reading class was once called "vocabulary elass". Its teaching centres on vocabulary and grammar since most of English teachings are test-oriented. With implementing of the new curriculum standard, more attention has been paid to the communicative function of language. How to use the language to communicate appropriately becomes a common concern for English learners.In linguistics, language is an abstract system used mainly for human communication. Therefore, the ultimate goal of language teaching is to train our students to acquire the ability to communicate. Not infrequently do we find in teaching that students are unable to keep track of the theme of a discourse even after they have studied the discourse sentence by sentence, or have trouble in recalling it. Some students make up grammatical, correct sentences which don't make sense in their context. These kinds of problems go beyond the scope of vocabulary or grammar. They are relevant to the problem of where to start, how to relate the following paragraph with the previous sentence and why some sentence sequences arepreferred over others.In the reading class, the task of teachers should include discourse analysis as well as teaching vocabulary and grammar. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the relationship of discourse and our reading class. We try to prove the practical significance of introducing discourse analysis to our reading class with support of some sample text analysis.This paper consists of four chapters. Chapter One focuses on the discourse analysis through which we can draw theories concerned to instruct our reading teaching. Chapter Two discusses thematisation and reading instruction. The theme is what Halliday calls a "point of departure" (1967:212). It suggests what a text is about. Chapter three will illustrate how contextual analysis is applied to teaching efficient reading comprehension skills in a holistic cyclic approach. By contextual analysis is meant the analysis of the context of a text or part of a text for comprehension. Chapter Four discusses lexical cohesion and reading instruction. Lexical cohesion mainly includes: the repetition of lexical items with similar meanings; lexical items connected in the form of superordination and collocation of lexical items sharing some likeness.In this paper an attempt has been made to describe thethematisation, various devices of lexical cohesion from the viewpoint of discourse analysis. From the above discussion, we can see that discourse analysis not only sheds light on the teaching methods, strategies and procedures, but also discovers the relations among lexical items and those between discourse analysis and semantics. Applying discourse analysis in analyzing texts can deepen students' comprehension and enhance their evaluative and appreciative competence, thus serving the fulfillment of the goals set for the reading course. In short, this discourse analysis approach has a great potential for application in this course and therefore deserves further observational research.