The Application Of Text Analysis To English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

We are living in an age when science and technology are developing rapidly. Many things tend to be international. So it is necessary for us to have a good master of a foreign language. English is one of the most important languages.It’s widely accepted that English reading is quite an important language skill for EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students, which is a good and effective way for the readers to get a better understanding of the writer’s thinking process and get the information of the article. So, undoubtedly, reading teaching has been a focus of English teaching in senior high school. However, the traditional reading teaching employs the past knowledge-based analytical teaching approach, so-called "vocabulary class" teaching, that is to say, it emphasizes the importance of the explanations of individual words, sentences and grammar without context. It only stays at sentence level and the fact of the text as a whole text is neglected.Nevertheless, the highest standard (level9) in New English Curriculum Standard (The Ministry of Education, PRC,2003) requires learners should have the ability to guess the unknown language units by the given linguistic contexts. It is obvious that the existing reading teaching mode can’t satisfy the demands of cultivating learners’reading comprehension ability. In order to seek effective approaches to solving the problem, the researcher tries to discuss the application of text analysis to English reading teaching in senior high school,which has been studied in recent years at home and abroad and gained some beneficial results. Meanwhile, the author has come up with some advice for implementing it in senior English class and presents her own teaching mode in six steps, including background reading, summary of main ideas, text structure analysis, guessing author’intention or attitude, explanations of language points and consolidation of after-class exercises. This teaching mode obeys the usual principle of step-by-step instruction and accord with the requirement of new curriculum standard.The subjects in the study are from two natural classes in senior grade one in Zhou Nan high school, Changsha city, Hunan Province. The author takes K1204, consisting of50students (EC) as the experimental class while K1220, another senior one class of50students (CC) as the control class. The author teaches these two classes, the students of which perform almost the same in the pretest, so the author chooses them to finish the research.During the experiment, control class follows their traditional ways. The author puts emphasis on the explanations of grammar and usage of each separate words or phrases, while students from EC are taught by the carefully designed experiment manipulates classroom activities, which means experimental class is treated with the teaching mode of application of text analysis to the reading teaching. By using schemata theory and analyzing various genres from the textbooks in details, the author aims to help the students analyze the micro and macro structure of the text. The experiment lasts a whole term, namely, six months, during which the teacher will observe students closely and take notes about their changes in English reading competence. Data will be finally collected from the questionnaire, teacher’s account and final-term examination analysis.By analyzing these different statistics, the author has got the results which indicate that the students from EC have achieved progress after the teacher’s reading instruction. And it is absolutely true that the new teaching mode of text analysis can solve the following three questions that the study puts forward:(1) Can text analysis help students enhance their reading quality and reading comprehension competence?(2) Can it change students’reading habits and reading interest?(3) How can teachers increase students’accuracy and speed of answering questions in tests? Then the hypothesis can be proved.To put it brief, it is concluded that the author suggests that the application of text analysis to reading teaching have a positive effect on students’comprehension of the text and can help them achieve higher scores in English test and she strongly advises teachers adopt this effective approach in daily teaching which can be of great help and value to their teaching.