The Application Of Discourse Analysis In Teaching English Reading In Junior Middle Schools

English reading is an indispensable part of studying English to the juniormiddle school students, which takes an important position among Englishteaching and it accounts for 20-40 percent in total scores in the entranceexamination to Senior Middle School. As we know, in the modern society oneperson who isn't able to study is illiterate. Learning to read plays a veryimportant role. Therefore, it is very important to learn to read in English.Today, the importance of English teaching is prominent. In the face of theserious drawback existing in the English teaching of junior middle schools inour country, we teachers should pay close attention to improving the Englishteaching quality and the students' ability.The full text is divided into four chapters altogether;the main contents ofevery part are as follows:Chapter One introduces the knowledge of discourse analysis and themain contents of discourse analysis: cohesion and coherence. Cohesion isdivided into reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical ties;andthe writer also elaborates the discourse structure. As there are two kinds ofwritings in the junior middle school textbooks, that is narration and exposition,the writer only introduces the characteristics of narration and exposition.Chapter Two discusses the problems when the students read the texts,mainly from the point of syllabus requirement, the teaching problems inteaching English reading and the students' questionnaire.Chapter Three explains the application of discourse analysis in teachingreading in English and the reading methods of using discourse analysis. Thewriter analyzes the articles of narrative and expository structure in the JuniorMiddle School textbooks. At the same time, the writer takes the junior middleschool textbooks and the entrance examination to Senior Middle School in2004 in some cities of China as language materials, and puts into furtheranalysis and explanation.Chapter Four is the writer's experiment to two classes. One class is thecontrol class. In this class, the traditional method is used, that is teachingwords, phrases and sentences. The other class is the experimental class. Thewriter adopts discourse and other supplementary ways to teach reading inEnglish for half a year in and out of class. In the two classes, the teacher andthe teaching materials are the same, and the students' level of the two classesare nearly the same. After half a year's practice, the students' reading ability inthe experimental class is obviously higher than the students in the controlclass, and the writer gets the implications.Through the introduction of relevant theories and experiment research, thispaper has verified the function of using discourse analysis in English reading.Discourse analysis has enormous positive influence on the students'understanding to the text. After half a year's practice, the writer finds theimportance of the application of discourse analysis in English reading injunior middle schools and gets the meaningful implications. Therefore, inteaching English reading, the teachers should try their best to help the studentsto analyze the text with discourse analysis knowledge, in order to help themimprove their reading ability.In this thesis, the writer just discuss preliminarily the application ofdiscourse analysis to English reading in junior middle schools, with the hopeof having positive meanings to English reading. In this respect, the deeper andmore overall research is needed.