An Experimental Study On The Application Of Discourse Analysis Teaching In Junior High School

Reading is an essential intellectual skill, which contributes to language input andaccumulation. As a result, reading teaching becomes a recent trend in the research offoreign language education. And it has experienced numerous changes and reformsunder the influence of different teaching approaches and theories. Nowadays, the NewCurriculum has made higher requirements for students’ reading ability. However, inthe present reading teaching practice, it is obvious that many students have greatdifficulties in improving their reading skills and their reading comprehension are farfrom being satisfying. This suggests the deficiency in the present teaching method.And it is advisable that English reading teaching should focus on the discourse itself.This study attempts to form a method to develop English reading teaching byusing some relevant theories of discourse analysis. In this study, McCarthy andLabov’s text structure theories serve as the framework to develop the macro tasks ofreading teaching. In addition, Halliday and Hason’s cohesion theory as well as hiscontext theory is introduced to explore the micro tasks.The research questions in this study are:1) Can discourse-based reading teachingmethod improve students’ reading comprehension?2) Can discourse-based readingtraining contribute to students’ discourse awareness?To examine the effectiveness of the discourse-based reading teaching methodsuggested in the study, an empirical study is conducted.184Junior One students froma high school are involved. The experiment lasts for sixteen weeks with differentteaching treatment to the experimental group and controlled group. Both groups usethe same reading textbook Oxford English7B(Guangzhou Edition). But discourseskills are only used in the experiment group, while the controlled group follows theprevious traditional way. Data are collected and analyzed from pre-test and post-test,questionnaire and semi-structured interview. The think-aloud technique is applied inthe interview.The major findings are summarized as follows:1) The discourse-based reading teaching can promote students’ reading efficiency and improve their readingcomprehension, especially to those of the medium-level.2) The discourse-basedreading teaching was effective in forming students’ discourse awareness.3) The textstructure knowledge can be efficiently applied to the English reading teaching and cancontribute to students’ understanding of English writing structure.The findings indicate that the discourse-based reading teaching method isfeasible and efficient in a way.However, how to explain the discourse analysis theory is the key point in thisteaching method, which is an issue worthy of further exploration and discussion. Thisstudy finally provides its recommendations for further research.