An Empirical Study On The Application Of Discourse Analysis To The Teaching Of English Reading In High School

Reading has become the main task in senior high school English teaching. However, the traditional Chinese reading classes overemphasized the importance of vocabulary and grammar while neglecting the formation of students’reading abilities. Discourse analysis provides the students with the methods to analyze the passage using the knowledge of text patterns as well as cohesion and coherence.Based on the theories of discourse analysis and the current teaching situation, this thesis adopted discourse analysis as the teaching methodology to seek out whether it has an effect on the reading abilities of the first year students in senior high school.Having proved the necessity and feasibility of adopting discourse analysis in the reading classes and designed the overall process of the research, the empirical study was carried out in two classes of Grade One from Zhongshan No.1middle school in Guangdong Province. During a whole term, one class applied the theories of discourse analysis, such as structures of different writing styles and the knowledge of cohesion and coherence, to the reading comprehension courses while the other class read reading comprehension passages as usual with the teacher analyzing language points and grammar and the students memorizing the useful words, expressions, and sentence structures. At the end of the research, the test results of the two classes and questionnaires before and after the research were analyzed.The results indicated that discourse analysis methodology has greatly improved the testers’reading abilities, and that most of the testers felt more confident to grasp the details and the main idea of the passage as well as the writers’intentions. What’s more, they are now more likely to make adequate judgments. Therefore, the author concluded that discourse analysis does have an effect on the student’reading abilities.