A Study On Chinese Non-english Majors' Discourse Comprehension Competence

In the past decades, numerous researches have been done on discourse, discourse comprehension and discourse competence. At the initial stage, discourse comprehension research focuses on the discourse comprehension of adults. However, with the development of linguistics and psychology, discourse comprehension research has been conducted from the developmental point of view, in which people's discourse comprehension development from childhood to adulthood is dealt with. Meanwhile, discourse comprehension researchers also have carried out experiments to study the discourse comprehension models. Later, attention has been transferred to discourse comprehension levels. Most researchers prefer to choose the commonly adopted distinctions among the surface code, the text-base, and the referential situation level made by Van Dijk & Kintsch (1983).On the basis of the three main discourse comprehension levels, the author has designed a four-construct model, namely, vocabulary comprehension competence, sentence comprehension competence, paragraph comprehension competence and the whole text comprehension competence, within which the former two can be categorized into the surface code level, paragraph comprehension can be considered as the comprehension of the surface code level and the text base level; the whole text comprehension can be regarded as the comprehension of the three connected levels, namely, the surface code level, the text base level and the referential situation level.250 non-English majors from Xihua University have been chosen as the subjects in the study. They are asked to read two discourses, in which one is an argumentative text and the other is a narrative text and to finish the questions. The performances of the two experimental groups are compared in terms of the whole text comprehension score (summary completion), the paragraph comprehension score (heading-choosing), the sentence comprehension score (True or false questions and multiple choice) and the vocabulary comprehension score (multiple choice). The results revealed that: (1) Most of the students have difficulties in comprehending the discourse, especially the sentences in the discourse; (2) Gender does not necessarily influence discourse comprehension competence; (3) The non-English majors'discourse comprehension competence declines as they enter into a higher-grade class; (4) Female's discourse comprehension competence declines with the male's and the female's and male's discourse comprehension competence declines , following the general trend discussed above.The paper casts light on the college English reading teaching and provides insight into how to maintain and improve discourse comprehension competence of college students during college English reading teaching.