An Empirical Research On English Reading Teaching Based On Discourse Analysis Theory In Senior High School

Reading is a significant means for people to gain information, as well as a way that people adopt to communicate with each other. As we all know, English reading teaching is an indispensable part in English teaching in middle school. The entrance English examination syllabus especially emphasizes that the reading comprehension questions should cultivate the candidates’ capability to understand the logistic relations with the context. However, the traditional English teaching modes mainly focus on vocabulary and grammar, which just stayed at the sentence level and gave explanation of new words, phrases, sentence structures and translation of sentence meaning without connecting them to the context. Although students may master some basic knowledge on vocabulary and grammar, they are unable to grasp the macro structure and the author’s real intention of writing, which leads to low accuracy rate in English reading.This paper is aimed to explore means to improve the students’ awareness of discourse and use it to guide teachers do better reading teaching in senior high school by combining discourse analysis theory with practical reading teaching reality, using English textbooks issued by Foreign Language Teaching and Researching Press as the carrier. This study adopted the literature research methodology, questionnaire method and experimental method. Based on the literature reviews of the process of reading, reading level, reading models related to reading theories and discourse analysis theory, the author applies the method of questionnaire into investigation, setting the questionnaire survey among students on reading and understanding the problems, and explore how discourse analysis theory can be used to instruct English reading teaching and how it enable students to initially construct a discourse consciousness. At last, the author compared both the reading test scores and analyze results in two classes, where the experimental class uses discourse analysis theory to perform reading class and the contrast class uses traditional teaching method. The innovation of this thesis lies in the application of discourse analysis into guiding English reading teaching. Through the questionnaire and reading test, we can confirm that the feasibility of discourse analysis teaching and also find its shortcomings during implementation. On the basis of discourse analysis theory and schema theory, the author creatively gives the corresponding strategies to improve the shortcomings, which can be a reference for middle school teachers to have a better implementation in discourse teaching.With the obtained results we can find that applying discourse analysis theory in Senior High English reading teaching can cultivate students to grasp overall article and comprehend logic relationship of context and development sequence of the article more easily. As soon as students can fully and sensitively comprehend the discourse structure, they may be able to master the main idea of each paragraph and find out the important details more fluently and accurately, which can also improve the speed level and accuracy in reading.