An Empirical Study On Critical Reading Under Critical Discourse Analysis In College English Instruction

In the information age, applying critical discourse analysis into English reading class is acritical reading model. It could promote that the reader participates actively and analyzes textwith logical thinking and critical language awareness. Students learning critical discourseanalysis could analyze effectively the real information and master real purpose of writer. Thiscould promote development of students-oriented reading model. Besides, in2013, Syllabusfor College English Test—Band Four (CET-4) requires that students learn to analyze thelogic and hidden meanings of text. So, it is important to apply critical discourse analysis intoEnglish reading class.However, in traditional China’s reading classroom, most comprehension of a text just liesin the meanings of the text itself, but which ignored the complex communication between theauthor’s intent and the reader’s ability to decode author’s intent. Furthermore, most studentsare poor readers, which lead to passive learning without motivation of learning English. Sothis experimental study aimed to apply critical discourse analysis into English reading class tohelp improve students’ reading ability and increase students’ critical language awareness,which improve their interest in the English reading.Based on the critical realism theory, systematic functional linguistics, and schema theory,this experiment study is carried out in the textbook—Practical English Comprehensive Course(Book2), published by Higher Education Press. The participants are randomly from thestudents of two almost equal-level classes in a higher professional training school in Dalian.The two classes are separated as the Experimental Class and Control Class (N=60). The studyperiod is a semester. Data is collected by questionnaires, pre-test and post-test papers. Andwith the help of SPSS, two classes are tested in the significant difference in reading abilityafter learning critical reading skills. The results indicate that students’ reading ability inExperimental Class is better than those in Control Class, and their critical language awarenessis also improved.The experiment has many implications and suggestions on the future research, forinstance, in reading instruction, teacher should guide students do more language thinking. Butthis experiment has some limitations. For instance, the non-public texts—students’ book ismainly as the study materials. I hope more relative public texts will be analyzed and somemore other reading skills will be practiced to improve students’ reading ability.