Study On Application Of Appraisal Theory To Advanced English Reading Teaching

From the angle of current situation of college English teaching, our higher education haspaid attention to the teaching of language form for a long time, which results in students’ poorreading ability. For English major students, they should cultivate a higher reading ability, criticalunderstanding and appreciative understanding, besides memorizing the meaning of words andanalyzing the sentence structure. Therefore, it is necessary for the students to make a fullanalysis and appreciation toward the texts, which is based on the understanding the basic contentof the discourse.The author of this thesis reasonably adopts the scientific elements in Appraisal Theory andtries to apply this kind of new theory into the text analysis in Advanced English and classroomteaching in the hope of probing into a new field of application for Appraisal Theory and findingan effective method to improve the students’ reading in Advanced English.In order to prove Appraisal Theory feasible and effective in reading teaching in AdvancedEnglish, under her supervisor’s guidance, the author did a series of researches and interviews on74English majors (37accepted experimental teaching methods and other37accepted traditionalteaching methods) in Grade2009in Foreign Language College of Wuhan University of Scienceand Technology. The same tests were distributed to these two classes twice respectively whosestudents are with the same English reading level before the experiment in September,2011(before learning Advanced English) and in June,2012(after learning Advanced English). Inaddition, after learning Advanced English for one year, the author interviewed the students in theexperimental class to get a clear idea of the students’ attitude and true feelings toward suchteaching method.All the data in this thesis were collected from the questionnaire and the interviews. Andafter collecting data, the author did qualitative and quantitative analysis of them and could getthe following conclusion: the permeating of Appraisal into the reading teaching in AdvancedEnglish can make the experimental students’ reading ability reach a higher level compared withthe students in control class. By virtue of SPSS (13.0), the analysis of results and discussionshows the experiment is successful.