The Application Of Discourse Analysis To English Reading Teaching In Vocational School

In the process of English learning, the cultivation of reading ability is the key to improving students’ language comprehensive abilities. At present, in Public English Test System, reading comprehension occupies a large part of scores, it can be seen that reading comprehension has become one of the most important goals of English teaching and learning. However, in vocational school English reading teaching, the traditional teaching method is still teacher-centered and focuses on solving the problems of vocabulary and grammar, which constrains the development of students’ reading ability. In traditional teaching method, students can hold lexicon knowledge and grammar skills, but the method separates words from the whole text, which ignores the text-analysis ability. That is the main reason leads to students’ reading ability not high generally.The discourse analysis method aims to use the discourse, analyzes the text type, textual patterns, context, coherence and cohesion, theme and rheme among the passage, promoting students understand background, structure and main idea of the reading materials, and making students analyze the text more effective and guiding students attain information based on discourse analysis and then improving students’ reading proficiency. This research attempts to apply some relevant theories of discourse analysis to testify its effectiveness to English reading teaching.The research tries to explore the following issues:1. Is discourse analysis method in improving the students’ English reading interests superior to the traditional teaching method?2. Under the guidance of discourse analysis, can the students cultivate better reading habits than traditional teaching class?3. Compared with the traditional teaching method, is the discourse analysis method more helpful for students to improve their reading proficiency?The research participants include 84 students majoring in Mechanical Manufacture and Computer Applied Technology, Grade2, which come from Panshan Vocational School, in Panjin. These participants are divided into two groups: one is control class(CC for short) which is taught in traditional teaching method, the other is experimental class(EC for short) which is taught based on discourse analysis. And the author carries out questionnaire and reading test to the participants, the data of questionnaires and tests are both analyzed by SPSS13.0. After that, the author asks 8 students from EC to have an interview.After 16-week experiment, the results show that EC has made greater progress of reading proficiency than CC, the reading interests and reading habits also have improved a lot at the same time. Discourse analysis teaching method achieves effect obviously. Therefore, it suggests that teachers in vocational schools should highlight discourse analysis method in their reading classes to cultivate students’ strong discourse competence, and improve students’ reading proficiency.