Application Of Discourse Analysis In English Reading Teaching For Senior Students

The traditional Senior English teaching aims at the cultivation and accumulation of knowledge. Reading class was once called "vocabulary class". Its teaching centers on vocabulary and grammar, which leads to the students' lack of discourse knowledge. English teaching in senior school, however, aims at developing the students' integrating skills in using language.With implementing of the new Curriculum standard of Senior English for China Students, more attention has been paid to the cultivation of students' communicative competence. English teachers start putting more emphasis on the understanding of the whole text in their English reading teaching. Senior English books provide rich linguistic materials for teachers to use discourse analysis teaching method. It can make students more active and interested in English learning and helps teachers to form the student-centered teaching pattern gradually in their reading classes.Based on the theories of reading and discourse analysis, the author proposes the viewpoint of applying discourse analysis into Senior English text teaching. Research methods used in this thesis are analysis, citing examples, questionnaire and experiment. The thesis outlines first of all the theories of reading and discourse analysis, and then from the perspective of teaching practice discusses why we need to introduce discourse analysis into Senior English text teaching. Text is the basic unit during real communication and discourse competence is one of the important elements of language communicative competence. At the same time, there is a high requirement in the aspect of discourse competence for Senior students in the new English Course Criterion. So discourse analysis has become the new perspective and means for Senior English text teaching. Starting from the basic concept of text, the author expounds the basic theory of discourse analysis and text teaching and theoretically demonstrates the feasibility of applying discourse analysis into Senior English text teaching. From the teaching practice, the author shows us the general pattern and processes of reading teaching and discusses how we analyze the texts in the actual Senior English reading teaching. The aspects that we should cover are: background knowledge of the text, macrostructure (genre and textual pattern) and microstructure (grammatical connectors, lexical connection and logical connectors). Then the author presents a teaching sample todemonstrate the basic procedures of text teaching. Aided by the teachers' and the students' questionnaires on the English reading teaching and learning at senior schools today , the thesis makes it clear that the students' lack of knowledge in discourse analysis leads to their poor reading competence .The last section is a report of the experiment on the application of discourse analysis in English reading teaching for senior students .The statistics derived from the text teaching experiment proves that the text teaching is efficacious.One of the findings obtained from the studies of the theories and the experiment shows that the application of discourse analysis in English reading teaching can help the senior students improve their English reading skill as well as their communicative competence.