On The Application Of Discourse Analysis Theory In The Teaching Of English Reading In Senior High School

With the increasingly popular communication between China and the rest of the world, many advanced views of English teaching are pouring into China. Among these views, an important one is that we should pay attention to developing students’ English reading ability. English reading is not only an important way of language input, but also the main method of English teaching. For the current condition of English teaching in senior high school, many teachers are still using the traditional teaching methods. The majority of their time is devoted into the teaching of grammatical items, the usage of vocabulary and some basic sentence patterns. In some degree, this kind of method may make some contributions to students’ performance in exams. However, it is not effective to cultivate and develop students’ English interest and ability in the long run. Because the traditional teaching method divides one reading text into several piecemeal parts instead of giving students one completed picture of the whole text. As a result, many students fail to grasp the general idea of a text from the overall perspective.Recent studies both at home and abroad show that the discourse analysis theory can give some important enlightenment to the improvement of English teaching model, even provides a new way for the teaching of English reading. According to the discourse analysis theory, the object of language teaching should be the whole discourse instead of just some sentences or words. With the help of discourse analysis, the reader can have a better understanding of the writer’s intention, the organization of contents in a reading text, the connections between the contents, and the main idea of a text. If we put this theory into practice in the teaching of English reading in senior high school, we will greatly improve the students’ English reading ability and enhance students’ interests of reading. Based on the discourse analysis theory and relevant researches, this thesis wants to discuss how teachers can apply discourse analysis theory in the teaching of English reading in senior high school in order to correct the weaknesses of the traditional methods and seek out a more effective English reading teaching model to make some contributions to the improvement of students’ reading performance.Firstly, the author introduces some relevant theories: the content and development of discourse analysis, schema theory, cohesion theory, genre analysis patterns theory and three basic reading models. The author conducted a teaching experiment on 80 students who come from two common classes in Lang fang No.15 senior high school. The instruments in this teaching experiment are a questionnaire and two reading tests. After analyzing the results of the pre-test and the questionnaire, the author find that most of the selected students do not have good reading habits. In the author’ opinion, we English teachers can apply the discourse analysis theory to the teaching of English reading so as to help students cultivate good reading habits and strategies. A comparative experiment can be used to test the discourse analysis theory-based teaching model’ s efficiency, and the 80 selected students can be divided into an experiment-class where the teacher uses the discourse model and a control-class where the traditional model is applied. After the experiment, the author adopts the reading to justify the effectiveness of the new teaching model. What we can know from the results is that greater progress has been made in experiment-class instead of the control-class. Based on what has been discussed, the author put forward the discourse analysis theory-based teaching model.