The Application Of Discourse Analysis In Extensive Reading Teaching To English Majors

Based on the systemic-functional grammar, this thesis attempts to study the teaching effect of application of discourse analysis in the extensive reading teaching. It is hypothesized that teaching the relevant concepts of cohesion, context, theme and rheme in class can help students understand the background, the structure, and the main idea of the text. The teaching model will enhance students’reading ability and improve the teaching effect of extensive reading class.Two classes of freshmen, with32students in the experimental group (EG) and32students in the control group (CG), are chosen to carry out the14-week empirical study. The author adopts the discourse-analysis-based teaching model with EG and the traditional grammar-translation method with the CG which is teacher-centered in extensive reading teaching.The author makes use of three instruments in the experiment:tests, questionnaires and an interview. The pre-test and a questionnaire are administered to both groups before and after the experiment. Besides, a face-to-face interview is given to EG to gain the feedback information after the experiment. At last, SPSS17.0is employed to analyze the data from the experiment.The result shows that the experimental group improves remarkably in reading ability guided by discourse analysis while the control group doesn’t, which proves that extensive reading teaching under the guidance of systemic functional grammar theory can help improve students’reading ability and this may present some pedagogical implications to the extensive reading teaching.