On Application Of Discourse-Analysis Approach To Improvement Of Senior Middle School Students' Reading Ability

Reading is very important in the teaching of English in the middle school. It is the teaching importance as well as the difficult point. The reason why we consider reading to be so important is that reading passages are the resources and bases on which we can learn words, sentence structures as well as grammar. Important as it is, many teachers of English can't deal with the relationship between the language meaning and the language form in their limited teaching time. With traditional teaching method, many teachers pay much attention to the language form, but at the same time they neglect the teaching of the language meaning. They always divide the whole passage into several parts, explaining and translating the language points word by word or sentence by sentence .Sometimes they even spend the whole class in comparing words,enlarging vocabulary and analyzing a lot of expressions in the passages, which is meaningless and a waste of time. In this way, the teachers will make interesting texts become dull .The passage broken into pieces, the students will find it hard to understand the inside connection among the characters and it's difficult for them to handle the development of the plots. What's worse, this kind of teaching won't lead to good learning of the language form., nor will it be good for understanding the language meaning. It is obvious that traditional teaching doesn't have an ideal effect in the present teaching.However, it is lucky that we now have a new way of teaching for reading—discourse analysis. This method not only means learning the complete plot ,but also means combining the language form with the language meaning. In this way, teachers can help the students obtain rich language information, increase their knowledge, enlarge their view scales so that they can become more interested in their studies and their thinking ability can also be improved.As we know, developing students' reading ability calls for developing their ability of understanding the passages. Only on the basis of understanding the passages can they develop their communication skill in spoken and written English, which is the key of developing the students' creativity in English teaching. So we suggest performing a new teaching model, which is based on the Cognitive Psychology and Schematic Theory, centered on the students, purposed on developing the students' communicating ability, relied on the method of passage analysis, hoping for building up the students ability of using English.This new model calls for the following abilities: Firstly, you must understand the whole plot of the passage, using the learnt language knowledge to scan and search the main clue so that you can have a brief impression of the passage that you have read; Then, you can divide the passage into several parts and find out the main ideas, which is literal comprehension; After that, on the basis of the first two steps, you can try to understand the author's writing purpose and opinion so that you can have Inferential comprehension; Finally, according to the writers' expression, you can express your own idea and personal opinion in order that you will have critical comprehension.According to the characteristics of the new model, I offered many practical suggestions for three periods: presentation in pre-reading; comprehension in while- reading and reflection in post-reading. Each suggestion is followed by some true cases and detail explanation. So the model is really practical for students and teachers.I also did experiments in my school. I am teaching two classes now, one is experimental class, and the other is compared class. In the experimental class I perform the discourse-analysis teaching method, while in the compared class I use traditional teaching method. After a term, I tested the students in the two classes and got the result: the achievements of the experimental class are obviously better than those of the compared class. So I made the following conclusion: The new teaching method of reading—discourse -analysis method is better for improving students' reading interest and reading ability than the traditional method, also, it does good to improving students' creativity. Even so, because of the small number of the students who attend the experiment, the data and the result of the experiment still remain to be checked.Generally speaking, I made a survey, combining with my teaching experience, and found that students really have much difficulty in understanding the passages. First of all, they are lack of good knowledge of the words,sentence structure and grammar . Then, they are incapable of analyzing the passages , which is an obstacle to understanding the passage fully. Besides, the shortage of their reading skill also prevent them from improving their reading comprehension,In order to improve the disadvantages, I leant the classical theory of some famous educators and put forward a set of new reading teaching method—discourse-analysis model , hoping for supply some reference materials for other teachers of English.