A Study Of Attitudes In Narrative Texts From Senior High School English Textbooks (Required Module/PEP)

Obviously, reading plays an important part in English learning. However, the presentreading teaching is unsatisfactory in senior high school. The teacher mainly focuses onvocabulary and grammar; students can only understand individual words and sentences ratherthan the entire meaning of a text. They are unable to understand the writer’s purpose, the mainidea and the implied meaning, dealing just with the surface level of texts. One of the mostimportant reasons lies in their lack of consciousness of discourse. Discourse analysis sees textmeaning as a whole rather than separate sentences or words.The Appraisal Theory studies interpersonal meanings from the perspective of discoursesemantics. Attitude system is the central one within appraisal system. Exploration ofattitudinal resources can help readers to reveal the writers’ attitudes and to discover theconnotative meanings. Agreat many researches on the application of the Appraisal Theory tocollege English reading have been done domestically, but few has been done to the readingteaching in senior high schools.Narration is one of the most widely used and highly valued genres, which occupies alarge proportion in senior high school English textbooks. The rich interpersonal meaningswithin the narrative texts always attract the readers’ great interests. The application of theAppraisal Theory to the analysis of narrative texts will greatly help the students understandthe texts deeply, adequately and accurately.Based on the background above, the paper collects data from the Required Module ofSenior High School English textbooks (PEP), which are used by most of senior high schoolstudent in China. After a general exploration, the paper chooses three narrative texts ofdifferent themes as examples to analyze their attitudinal resources and to reveal the writers’purposes, main ideas, and implicit meanings. Simultaneously, the paper put forward threeresearch questions. First, how do the attitudinal resources work in the narrative texts? Second,what’s the characteristic of attitudinal resources distributed and used in the narrative texts?Third, how can the interaction between the Appraisal Theory and narrative genre specify theauthor’s writing purposes and enhance their implied meanings and the main idea?By careful studying, the paper finds that the attitudinal resources in the narrative textsare abundant in judgmental and affective resources, but lack of appreciating resources, whichcan be accounted for by the different purposes of different narrative themes. The study alsoshows that the three types of attitudinal resources coordinate and interact with each other toachieve the narrative goals. And the distribution of attitudinal resources displays how thenarrative authors weave the resources and develop the stories in order to push them to the goals. Furthermore, the exploration on attitudinal resources clearly reveals the underlyingmeaning of the narrative texts, and helps readers to seize the organizations and main ideas oftexts and see how the writers’ purposes are achieved step by step. Within the process ofanalysis, the readers will perceive how the the narrative authors arouse their emotions anddesign implications by working with the interpersonal meaning of language.This paper is expected to contribute to the deep understanding of narrative texts forstudents and a practical teaching method for teachers. Also it tries to raise someenlightenments of reading teaching and provide some theoretical application for researchesand senior high school English teachers.