The Application Of Discourse Organization Theory To English Reading Instruction For Senior High School Students

In accordance with the New National English Curriculum Standards (Experiment,2003) for senior high school students, four fundamental language skills are required: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Among them reading is of the greatest importance for the reason that it’s the essential access for students to acquire language knowledge. Therefore, reading attracts much attention of English teaching in senior schools. The goal of reading instruction for senior students set by the New National English Curriculum Standards is to develop students’reading ability so that they can read effectively and rapidly. Based on the newly published Standards, testing questions of reading comprehension in College Entrance Exam Paper are designed in a new perspective:aiming at testing students’discourse awareness and their reading abilities, it focuses on understanding the whole discourse comprehensively. Furthermore, it takes up a large portion in the test paper. Then whether reading teaching strategies focus on the cultivation of students’discourse awareness as well as the improvement of reading abilities? The answer is negative. Through consulting literature and questionnaire, students are found to know little about discourse knowledge, let alone applying them into reading, at the same time, their reading abilities and reading achievements are dissatisfying. Based on the discourse organization theory stated by Liu Chendan(1999) and Grabe&L.Stoller (2005), the inseparable relationship between reading and discourse theory can be found, hence, there is no doubt that the attempt of applying discourse organization theory into reading teaching is reasonable. Application of discourse organization theory into reading teaching is to cultivate the students’discourse organization awareness and discourse competence, so that the discoure organization knowledge can aid them to understand and grasp genre, text type, textual pattern and text-strategic continuity, resulting in understanding the text comprehensively, meanwhile, achieving interaction with the author and the discourse successfully. This study is try to validate the effects of the application of discourse organization theory, therefore the research questions of this study are as follows: What’s the present situation of English reading of the senior high school students before the application of discourse organization theory to reading teaching?How can English teachers apply discourse organization theory to reading teaching in senior high schools?What’s the effect of applying discourse organization theory to reading teaching for senior high school students?The research methods adopted by this study were experiments and questionnarie, besides, all the collected data were analyzed by SPSS19.0. The subjects of this study were two parallel classes of Grade Two of one senior middle school in a county of Anhui Province. Through analysis of the questionnaires before the experiment, the results showed that these two classes know little about discourse organization knowledge, and moreover, they were almost at the same level of reading by analysing the pre-test. The experiment lasted a whole term with one teacher adopting two different methods to teach the two classes.To be specific, reading strategies based on discourse organization theory were applied in reading teaching in EC, in contrast, traditional reading methods were used in CC. At the end of the experiment, the results of the post-test showed a significant difference between these two classes, that is, the average score of reading of EC was obviously higher than that of CC. Furthermore, the results of questionnaire at the end of the experiment indicated that under the guidance of teacher, the students in EC could apply the discourse organization theory into reading comprehension by themselves, such as background knowledge, prediction through genre, text-strategic continuity and text diagrams.Based on the analysis of the above, the following conclusion can be drawn: discourse organization knowledge can improve students’reading abilities effectively.