Metafunctional Analysis Of Discourses In Advanced English

Advanced English is a required course for senior English majors, and its purpose is to further students’ comprehensive English skills, especially their deep-level reading comprehension ability, rhetoric recognition ability and translation and writing ability. In teaching, by guiding students in their reading and analyzing materials of different themes and genres of the classics, teachers try to enhance students’ ability of analyzing text structure and appreciating the writing style, strengthen students’ accumulation of cultural knowledge and language materials, and consolidate and improve students’ English language skills.The traditional Advanced English teaching is mainly dominated by teachers who finish the teaching task by explaining the language points in the text, focusing on explanation of words and phrases, the structural arrangement, the theme of a text and the rhetorical devices. This kind of teaching mode, which highlights the knowledge dissemination and despises students’ ability development, neglects the training of students’ comprehensive analysis ability and the knowledge output process, thus causing the low interaction between teachers and students and the lack of interest and initiative in classroom.In China, research on the application of functional linguistics has made enormous strides in the field of foreign language teaching, translation and stylistics studies, and especially in foreign language teaching; the applied research is indispensable. However, most of the current applied research is still in the research phase of teaching philosophy or teaching ideas under the guidance of Systemic Functional Linguistics and these studies provide alternative way for the future teaching practice, but how to put this way of teaching into practice is not clear. A large number of teachers who take up the basic foreign language education need the guidance of teaching philosophy and ideas based on Functional Linguistics, but they are not yet familiar with Functional Linguistic theory and they cannot do consistent applied research themselves. Therefore, it is very necessary to draw on the advanced theory at home and abroad and to explore practical application of English teaching methods under the guidance of Systemic Functional Linguistics.This paper, based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, analyzes the texts in Advanced English textbooks from the perspective of ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function, aiming to apply Systemic Functional Grammar as a pedagogic theory in Advanced English teaching, to verify the practicality and operability of Systemic Functional Grammar in Advanced English teaching and to confirm that the theory of metafunction in Systemic Functional Linguistics is very useful in Advanced English teaching. If the teachers can make appropriate use of the theory of metafunction to guide the English teaching practice, they can not only fully explain the language problems which are difficult to explain in traditional grammar, but also make the students realize that the language learning process is not just the process of learning the rules of grammar, but a selection and socialization process, which can explore students’ potential to use language, stimulate students’ creative use of language and improve students’ language sensibility, appreciation and creativity.