The Application Of Discourse Analysis To Senior English Teaching Of Reading

It has been widely acknowledged that reading plays a key role in developing students' linguistic competence. The teaching of reading is supposed to be the most important part of English language learning class. Students learn English and gain information mainly from reading, which provides the most efficient and important channel of linguistic input, and which can help not only to develop students' linguistic competence, but also cultivate their communicative competence. Therefore, it occupies a significant position in the English classroom teaching.Reading is a complicated process of psycho-linguistic activity and the result of interaction between language and thought. Its comprehension requires cooperation of the reader's related organs, knowledge structure and reading processing strategies skills. The traditional Senior English teaching of reading focused on the cultivation and accumulation of knowledge, and reading class was once said to be centered on vocabulary and grammar, of which the result is the students' lack of discourse knowledge. Such a teaching mode doesn't help our students get good linguistic competence. According to what is clearly stated in the new Curricular Standard of Senior English for China Students, English teaching in Senior school, however, aims at developing the students' integrating skills in using the language. To attain this purpose, the mode of present-day teaching of reading should be reformed, and it should shift its emphasis to the teaching of discourse analysis. As luck would have it, today's Senior English books provide rich linguistic materials for teachers to use the discourse analysis teaching method, which can motivate students and make them more interested in English learning and enrich their knowledge, thus improve students' communicative competence.In order to find an optimal approach to English reading teaching, this thesis, based on the theories of reading and discourse analysis, airs its views on a mode of the application of this theory to Senior English teaching of reading. It aims at improving the students' ability of reading and the effect of English Language Teaching class and attempts to guide the students in English reading comprehension. As a partial solution to the problem of how to teach reading, the paper deals with from the textual perspective how to apply discourse analysis to the teaching of reading in ELT classroom and discusses what this teaching mode can help us achieve in doing so. Then it addresses my understanding of the mode in teaching practice by analyzing the micro and macro structures of the text. To put it brief, the paper introduces the basic principles and concrete methods of discourse analysis in the teaching of reading, and makes clear the teachers' role as a guide, and the conduct of class as student-centered during the process of teaching of reading. It also holds that through analyzing the structure and background of the text, the students with the help of the teacher can understand the theme of the text. To illustrate the mode in a convincing way, the paper then presents a report of the experiment on the application of discourse analysis in the teaching of reading for Senior students. In the light of the report, the statistics derived from the experiment proves the good effect of the proposed teaching mode.Finally, the thesis summarizes one of the findings obtained from this study and its related experiment demonstrates that the application of discourse analysis in English teaching of reading can help the Senior students improve their English reading skills as well as their communicative competence.