The Application Of Discourse Analysis Theory In College English Reading Teaching

In the whole English-teaching system, reading plays an important part in theEnglish teaching. The reading ability of students can directly reflect the level ofteaching. As one of the main objectives of improving the students’ reading ability,reading is one of the most important parts of college English teaching. Thus theteaching of reading is stressed in the college English teaching. And teachers andstudents also make every effort to improve it, but the result is unsatisfying. It istime-consuming and effort-consuming task which has puzzled us.There are many reasons that lead to the unsatisfying situation in English readingteaching, one of which lies in the teaching method. Translation method andaudio-lingual method have been in the leading part in the English teaching. Teachersalways devote most of their time to explaining the new words, phrases andsentence-making. Their main task is explaining and drilling the rules of grammar. Theteaching method separates words from the whole text, which ignores the text-analysisability. In the traditional English teaching, teachers are still the center of theclassroom reading teaching while students are just the followers. Teachers ignorestudents’ interests, hobbies, needs and background knowledge of the text. That is tosay, teachers don’t consider the student as a whole person, but a passive recipient ofknowledge. Little by little, students will lose their interests in English learning. Thusthe traditional reading teaching mode can hardly enhance the students’ reading ability.The author carries out discourse analysis reading teaching in QingdaoTechnological University (Linyi), in order to testify: compared with traditionalreading teaching, the discourse analysis teaching method is better to reach therequirement of the English reading teaching and improve the students’ reading ability.First, the author conducts questionnaire surveys and interviews with18Englishteachers and650students in her university, so as to learn about the situation of college English reading teaching, the English teachers’ teaching concept, students’ interests inEnglish and the difficulties they are facing in English learning. Then, by analyzing theresults of questionnaires and interviews, the author points out the problems oftraditional college English reading teaching and summarizes necessity and superiorityof applying discourse analysis in English reading teaching. At last, the authororganizes college English teaching at discourse level, uses clear schematic structureand the example analysis in the narration, exposition and argumentation, thus to helpstudents to grasp the structure of the text and improve their reading ability.In this thesis, the author expounds the basic theory of reading, discourse analysisand some relevant terms. The author mainly explores how to use cohesion, coherence,theme and rheme in English reading teaching to help students to understand thestructure and main content of the materials.In order to testify applying discourse analysis in English reading teaching canenhance students’ reading ability，the author carries on the empirical research:adopting discourse analysis teaching method in a class of47sophomores for fourmonths, while another class with49students follows the traditional way of readingteaching that focuses on the grammar and vocabulary. Considering the reliability ofthe research, the author adopts quantitative analysis method of the pre-test andpost-test. From the analysis of the pre-test and post-test, it reveals that theexperimental class (EC) made greater progress than the controlled class (CC) inreading comprehension. The result of the research shows that the discourse analysisteaching approach can arouse the students’ interests of English study, and improvetheir reading ability, confidence and creativity.