An Analysis Of Reading Materials In Senior High School Based On Register Theory And Its Implications For Reading Teaching

The current English reading teaching in China is largely staying on the basis oftreating the articles as language entity. It teaches vocabulary, grammar as the main lineand emphasises on language knowledge, ignoring the information expressed by thearticles(Liang Juanjuan,2010:10). Some aim points of reading skills of high school arelisted in English Curriculum Standards: students are able to acquire and processinformation of articles; students will able to understand the purpose of the article;students are able to identify different stylistic features. Students will able to appreciatethe simple literary works with the help of teachers. Thus it can be seen that during theprocess of English reading teaching, teachers should not only teach students languageknowledge such as vocabulary, grammar, but should also pay attention to cultivatestudent’s ability of appreciating discourse style and establishing the consciousness ofappropriate language.This paper takes the high school reading materials as research object. Under theguidance of the register theory, the author analyzes these materials from three aspects.They are field of discourse, mode of discourse and tenor of discourse. The purpose ofthe analysis is to discuss how the three variables is reflected in the reading materials,how the language using is changed with the situation changes and what are theimplications for reading teaching based on register theory.The research results show that register theory plays an important guiding role inthe content, language, style and genre of articles. It provides a theoretical frameworkfor discourse analysis and let the teacher know from which aspects to analysis, not juststaying in the text of the surface but increasing the mining of the deep meaning. Theresults also show that if any of the three variables of register changes, the use oflanguage will change accordingly. It inspires the teachers to train the students’awareness of using English appropriately in different contexts.