A Study Of The Application Of Discourse Analysis Teaching Mode In English Reading Teaching

Traditional teaching method for English reading usually focuses more on explaining words, phrases or sentences one by one. Such teaching method destroys the understanding of the whole reading material as discourse and causes some problems in developing students’ reading ability so that students only tend to grasp words or phrases separately rather than reference of the author’s attitude, the general idea and inferences of reading materials.To develop the students’ integrating skills in using the language, a new reading mode based on discourse analysis will prevail in the English reading teaching for the belief that by means of analyzing the title, the structure and background of the text, the students can better understand the theme of the text and fully develop the reading competence. This paper tries to probe into the following questions:(1) Whether the students’reading ability can be improved through the application of discourse analysis in reading teaching?(2) Whether the discourse analysis awareness can be fostered with this teaching method?The paper first introduced the knowledge of reading and discourse analysis. Then hypothesis about whether the application of discourse analysis in reading teaching can significantly improve students’reading ability are made. Therefore, an experiment is conducted to test the hypothesis, which consists of three parts:pretest, experimentation and posttest. The subjects are freshmen of non-English majors of Xinjiang Agricultural University in Xinjiang province. In the process of the experimentation, the traditional method that emphasizes the importance of words, language points and grammar is used by the control group, while discourse-oriented teaching method by the experimental group. And the data collected from the pretest and posttest are comparatively analyzed by SPSS15.0for windows.After one term, I examined the subjects in the two groups and got the result:the achievements of the experimental group are obviously better than those of the control group. Therefore, a conclusion is drawn after a systematic analysis:The new teaching method of discourse analysis method is better for improving students’ reading interest and reading ability than the traditional method. Also, it does good to improve students’ creativity. However, because of the small number of the students participating in the experiment, the data and the results of the analysis are very much limited to some extent. It remains to be tested in the future study.