Application Of Discourse Analysis In Senior English Reading Teaching

The traditional English teaching aims at cultivation and accumulation of knowledge. Reading class was once called "vocabulary class". Its teaching focuses on vocabulary and grammar. Such teaching method destroys the unity of reading materials as discourses, and causes some common problems with students' reading ability: students tend to grasp words or phrases rather than the general idea of reading materials and fail to conclude the writer's intentions. With implementing of the new curriculum standard, more attention has been attached to the communicative function of language. The ultimate goal of language teaching is to train students to acquire the ability to communicate.Based on discourse analysis and several other reading theories, the author proposes the viewpoint of applying discourse analysis to Senior English text teaching. Research methods used in this thesis are analysis and experiment.The thesis presents the theories of reading and discourse analysis, and discusses why we need to introduce discourse analysis to 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 Curriculum Criterion. So discourse analysis has become the new perspective and means for Senior English text teaching. The author expounds the basic theory of discourse analysis and how to apply discourse analysis to Senior English reading teaching. What we should take into account is not only microstructure (grammatical connectors, lexical connection and logical connectors) but also macrostructure (textual pattern).To get to know to what extent the discourse-oriented approach works, the author made an experiment between two classes. One class is the experiment class, where discourse analysis was applied in the reading teaching. The other is the controlled class, where the reading teaching was carried out in the traditional way. Results of the experiment indicate that the experiment class makes greater progress than the controlled class within 4 months. Therefore, the conclusion can be drawn that the application of discourse analysis to Senior English reading teaching is efficient.