The Application Of Discourse Analysis To The Teaching Of Reading In Senior High School

English reading is an important and effective way to help readers improve their comprehensive language ability and get some information. But, traditionally, foreign language teaching has concentrated on grammar and vocabulary, especially in FL reading class of senior middle school. Teachers spend much time in explaining the usage of individual words and the structures of sentences. This teaching only stays at sentence level. As a result, the students are only good at understanding specific words and sentences. But they are incompetent at understanding of the whole discourse. New Curricula Standard for Senior School English requires high school students' reading ability to achieve levels from the sixth to the ninth. At the eighth level, the aims of developing student1 abilities are: after a careful reading of the text, students should be able to grasp the author's view points and specific attitudes he or she wants to express in his/her passage; students can recognize the features of different styles of different passages; students should be able to master the complete discourse, which is coherent and cohesive. At the ninth level, the aims of developing students' abilities are: students should be able to read some English articles from English newspapers and magazines; they can write all kinds of passages in different patterns of discourse. All in all, according to goals set by the English Curriculum Standard for senior middle school students, students must have higher level of reading comprehension and they should be able to grasp the whole discourse structure of a text and from the context and contextual discourse, they will be able to grasp certain features of discourse. Thus, gaps between students' reading ability and requirements are apparent and worrying. How to organize teaching in class and help students improve their reading ability to understand texts has become a prevalent problem that English teachers have to face. The author thinks, to a great extent, one alternative is the application of discourse analysis theory to senior middle school English teaching, which has been studied in recent years and gained some beneficial results.According to foreign and domestic research results, discourse analysis theory provides English teaching, especially reading teaching, with a new way. They provide theoretical basis for reading teaching. Some theories in the field such as schema, cohesion, and discourse structure pattern and so on are very important in enhancing the readers' comprehension ability.Based on a questionnaire investigation, theory study, experiments and test, this thesis has made a brief study on the application of discourse analysis in teaching English reading among senior two students. It focuses largely on cultivating students' reading skills of the whole discourse based on the theory of schema, cohesion, and discourse structure so as to improve their English reading comprehension. Through the introduction of relevant theories and experiment research, this paper has proved the discourse analysis in English reading has some positive effect on the students' comprehension of the text and increase their accuracy and speed of answering questions in test.The whole paper is divided into five chapters, as follows:The first chapter briefly introduces the importance of English reading instruction, analyzes the current situation and problems of reading instruction in senior middle school and proposes the application of discourse analysis theory in reading class in order to improve students' skill of reading comprehension.The second chapter mainly reviews the knowledge of discourse analysis and the main contents of discourse analysis: cohesion and text structure. Cohesion is divided into reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion .The author also elaborates three models for reading process: bottom-up model, top-down and Interactive model and related theory- schema theory.The third chapter deals with research methodology. In the research, two classes in Grade Two of Inner Mongolia Bao Gang No. 1 Senior Middle School were chosen which consisted of 50 students each respectively as a control group and an experimental group with the same level of English proficiency. In the experimental class, discourse theory was adopted during teaching. In the control class, traditional lecturing method was utilized as usual. The author conducts her one-term experiment to observe the result. Data collection includes both pre-test and post-test and questionnaire surveys as a qualitative data complement. The results of data analysis indicate that under the guidance of discourse analysis theory, students in the experimental class mastered the macro-structure of a discourse better and improved their English reading ability more rapidly than the control classThe last chapter is the research's results and analysis of the experiment.The author concludes that it is both effective and beneficial to use discourse analysis instruction in senior middle school English classrooms.