Applying Text Analysis To High School English Text Teaching

Text teaching occupies an important place in English teaching in high school. How to teach the text effectively has aroused general concern among senior middle school teachers. For a long time, main attention is fixed on vocabulary and grammar in high school English text teaching. However, every writing in the high school English books is a text. If the teacher explains the text without analyzing its topic, the purpose of the author, his writing style and skill and the cultural background involved, it's impossible for the students to understand the text to the full. The author distributes questionnaires to some students, in which the present situation of high school English teaching and senior students' reading habits are involved. The results of the questionnaires show that some shortcomings exist in high school English teaching, which badly require to be improved. Meanwhile, there is a high requirement in the aspect of text competence for senior middle school students in the new English Course Criterion;there are more and more examination questions aimed at testing the text competence in NMET. All these urge the application of a practical and effective approach to high school English text teaching.Combining her practical teaching experience and the systematic study of the theory of text analysis, the author proposes the viewpoint of applying text analysis to high school English text teaching. By doing this, the aim is not only to prepare students for examinations, but also because text is the basic unit during real communication and text competence is one of the important elements of language communicative competence. The author intends to discuss how to apply text analysis to real English text teaching in high school from the angles of macrostructure and microstructure. With the specific texts, the author discusses how to analyze the texts in real senior English text teaching, that is, we should first analyze the macro-structure, and then the micro-structure of a text. The former includes the background knowledge of the text and its genre and textual pattern. Background is very important in understanding a text. Only when the students have accumulated certain background knowledge can they understand, reason, remember and recall the reading material more easily. Whereas their reading comprehension will be much more difficult without any relevant background knowledge or the knowledge is not enough. The genre and textual pattern of a text can show the basic train of thought of the author. Texts of different genres are of different textual patterns. Awareness of the genreand textual pattern of a certain text can equip students with a clear thinking to understand it. With texts in different genres, the author discusses how to analyze different textual patterns, such as narrative writings, descriptive writings, expository writings and argumentation writings. Analyzing the micro-structure of a text means analyzing the coherence and cohesion of the text, the textual information flow and so on. The coherence of any text is attained through the cohesion between sentences, which form the surface layer of the text. There are a variety of cohesion approaches, of which grammar cohesion and vocabulary cohesion are widely used in Senior English texts, the two of which the author goes into in particular. Analyzing the textual information flow is a key to gaining the main information in the text.In order to prove it's workable to apply text analysis to High School English text teaching, the author carried out a long-term experiment with two classes of Grade Three in Ma Fangshan Middle school in Wuhan City, the English teacher of which is the author herself. There are forty-nine students in the experimental class and forty-seven students in the control class. The experiment begins in July, 2005 and ends in April, 2006, lasting thirty-two weeks. After months of practice, the experimental class have made greater progress in their English in comparison with the control class. The results of the general examinations with a common test paper for all the students from different schools in Wuhan City verifies the method is feasible with actual and scientific data. The outcome of the experiment proves that it is a success to apply text analysis to high school English text teaching. The work is less, but the result is better.