Applying Discourse Analysis To English Reading Teaching For Senior Students

Reading 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. 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 diswurse 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.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 reading 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 genre and 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, 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 whesion between sentences, which form the surface layer of the text. There are a variety of cohesion approaches, of which grammar cohesion,logic cohesion and vocabulary cohesion are widely used in Senior English texts, the three of which the author goes into in particular.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 Two in NO.20 Middle school in Huangshi City, the English teacher of which is the author herself. There are fifty students in the experimental class and fifty-one students in the control class. The experiment begins in September, 2007 and ends in Junuary , 2008, lasting twenty 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 final examination with a common test paper for all the students from different schools in huangshi 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.