Teaching Yi Students Reading Comprehension In Senior Middle School: A Pragmatic Approach

This research is a pragmatic study of the development of reading ability in senior high school Yi students. Its aim is two fold. On the one hand, it specially fathoms what factors affect Yi students' reading comprehension and what reading strategies Yi students are using in their reading of English. On the other, it tries to answer: What can we draw from the reading theories and discourse analysis theories to help the Yi students with their English reading, especially the deep level comprehension and which teaching approach will help ethnic minoritystudents in Yunnan to read better?Zhang (2002) claims that there are three worlds about a text: the production of a text, the analysis of the text and the comprehension of the text. The process of reading comprehension occurs in the latter two worlds. So in the teaching of English reading, we have to consider theories of discourse analysis and the three-level reading model. From the theories of discourse analysis, we have found that the factors that affect reading comprehension are background knowledge, cohesive devices and texture. There are three reading theories for the practice of reading teaching: the top-down model, the bottom-up model and the interactive model, which tell what happens when reading comprehension is going on. The bottom-up model envisions reading as a data-driven process, which starts with the interpretation of words while the top-down model thinks reading is a concept-driven process beginning from higher-level concept. Neither the bottom-up nor the top-down model of the reading process totally accounts for what occurs during the reading process, Rumelhart (1977) proposes an interactive model in which both letter features or data-driven sensory information and non-sensory information come together at one place. Using a computer analogy, Rumelhart (1985) labels this place as a message-board. In this model reading is not viewed simply as either a bottom-up or a top-down process, but instead as asynthesis of different patterns, calling for the application or integration of all of the previously identified knowledge sources.According to the above theories, this study regards English reading teaching as the process of grasping "the three-line method", i.e. background knowledge, cohesive devices, and discourse structure. This method intends to change the traditional sentence-oriented reading teaching into a discourse-based reading teaching. The background knowledge will help build the Yi students' schema related to the very discourse, which improves the comprehension a lot. The cohesive devices will help the Yi students to grasp the object of the discourse and its topic while the Yi students can reach the author's purpose of composing the text and the main idea of the text through figuring out the macro structure of the text by analyzing the character of its genre and clause relation (the semantic and logical relation).Using this "three-line method", we carried out a reading teaching experiment. The experiment began with a reading test checking the basis of the Han and Yi students' reading situation, which worked as the independent variables. During the course of the experiment, we taught the students with the method, which acts as the dependent variable. In order to clarify how the students behaved, we made a questionnaire and some interviews. This study has proved that the "three-line method" can effectively help the Yi students to focus their attention on the whole discourse instead of its individual sentences; it can help to avoid the logical confusion incurred by their mother tongue. This has resulted in faster reading speed and better comprehension. In the final test, the gap between the Yi and Han students was partly shortened.