A Study Of The Correlation Between Discourse Competence And English Reading Comprehension Of Senior High School Students

Reading is regarded as one of the basic ability and foundation for languageacquisition as well as a method to obtain information. The theories of moderneducation also highlight the importance of the teaching of English reading. A largenumber of teachers follow the traditional English teaching method. They evenmistakenly believe that the importance of reading should focus on explaininglinguistic points. Gradually, some students are accustomed to spend much timereciting vocabulary and translating word by word mechanically. They ignore to makefurther understanding on the intended meaning presented by the text.With the development of the theories of discourse analysis, the knowledge ondiscourse competence has been introduced into the instruction of English reading.Discourse competence refers to the ability to infer their main idea of each paragraphand the whole text by analyzing the literal meaning and even the relationshipsbetween sentences and paragraphs. It addressed to comprehend a certain text from theperspective of micro discourse competence and macro discourse competence.A number of scholars or researchers devote themselves to study the applicationof discourse competence into the instruction of English reading comprehension incollege or senior schools. Yet, few of them take an interest in the influence ofdiscourse competence on reading comprehension. The aim of this thesis is to verifythe author’s hypothesis: there is a positive correlation between discourse competenceand reading comprehension in senior school students. In order to fulfill this correlative research, a discourse knowledge test andreading comprehension test are designed and all the data collected form the tests areanalyzed by SPSS16.0. Then, the author will make further exploration on correlationsbetween discourse competence and each type of reading comprehension questions.Through qualitative and quantitative analysis, the author found that participants’discourse competence highly correlates with their reading comprehension and theirdiscourse competence has a comparatively significant correlation with the third typeof reading questions that is reading for main idea...