The Application Of Genre Analysis To English Reading Teaching In Junior Middle Schools

English reading is both a kind of intellectual activity to get information from discourses and a kind of process to acquire meanings from discourses. With the development of research on applied linguistics and psychologists, more and more linguists and scholars join in the discussion on reading comprehension. More and more English teachers have realized the significance of effective reading and have spared no effort to try to achieve it. However, most teachers have tended to follow the traditional teaching model where both the schematic structure of the text and students’communicative competence have been neglected in the English reading teaching for a long time. Especially, in junior middle schools, due to students’ limited language knowledge, some teachers choose to adopt a traditional Grammar-Translation Approach in their teaching of reading class. As a matter of fact, this approach has its unavoidable shortage though it is good for students to know more detailed language points, it can not help to improve students’reading skill. Thus it’s necessary to apply genre analysis to reading teaching. Reading comprehension is an important part in College Entrance Examination. In order to help students improve their reading abilities, teachers should teach students some knowledge about genre and guide students to analyze different kinds of genre with different discourse structures. The thesis tries applying genre analysis to English reading teaching by combining three reading teaching designs with three kinds of basic genre which frequently appear in junior middle schools.Genre analysis, based on the whole discourse analysis, is intended for training students’language communicative competence and enhancing students’genre awareness, so it is helpful to strengthen students’ability to know the deep meaning of a discourse. Genre analysis offers a new opportunity for English reading teaching because it tends to cultivate students’awareness of using genre analysis to discriminate different kinds of discourses and develop their communicative competence. Meanwhile, students’reading speed and efficiency will be improved so that their confidence in learning English is also likely to be strengthened. In recent years, whether abroad or home, many linguistics and teachers have begun to apply genre analysis to the teaching of English as a foreign language. However, genre analysis is only widely applied in writing area, and there is still not too much application in English reading teaching. What’s more, it is too often applied mainly in college schools. Sometimes it is applied in senior high schools but there is little application in junior middle schools. In this situation, the author attempts to do this study with the purpose of proving the necessity and significance of applying genre analysis to English reading teaching in junior middle schools.Except introduction and conclusion, this thesis is made up of three parts. The first part is a general review of genre analysis, which mainly introduces the definitions of genre given by Swale and Bhatia. Next, definition and development of genre analysis, the function, the patterns as well as the significance of genre analysis are also talked in the first part. Then in the following part, this thesis lists the objectives of English reading teaching in junior middle schools based on New Curriculum Standards and makes a statistic analysis about the different kinds of genre chosen from the five English textbooks named Go For It (People Educational Press) which are being used by some junior middle school students. What’s more, a brief introduction to characteristics of three common English genres: narration, exposition and argumentation is given, which frequently appear in English textbooks. In the third part, in order to help readers know how to apply genre analysis to English reading teaching in junior middle schools, the thesis gives three teaching designs according to the characteristics of the three kinds of genre. On the whole, the pattern of the English reading teaching adopted in the three teaching designs goes through four stages:genre analysis, group discussions, independent analysis, improving exercises, which is just the pattern of genre analysis. These designs bring out some new approaches to analyze discourses for English reading teaching. Though it is of realistic significance to adopt genre analysis in English reading teaching in junior middle schools, it still has its inevitable limitations, so at the end of this thesis, the author shows the limitations as well as some suggestions for English reading teaching in the future.By analyzing the schematic structure of some specific genre and applying genre analysis to the three main kinds of English reading genre in junior middle schools, the study shows that genre analysis is of great importance for English reading teaching and the author expects that this study will act as a small step towards future study in the field of genre analysis. However, due to the lack of author’s academic knowledge and limited studying conditions, this is only a basic and tentative study and it still has much to explore in this field.