The Effect Of Meta-discourse On Senior High School Students’ Reading Proficiency

Communication is a combination of both discourse and meta-discourse. Discourse concerns propositional content. Meta-discourse refers to the part beyond the proposition, it can be employed to organize discourse into a whole one. According to Halliday, discourse fulfill ideational function.Meta-discourse devices have both textual function and interpersonal function in texts..Meta-discourse are mainly studied from two perspectives: one is to analyze characteristics of meta-discourse in reading materials, the other is about its application on language instruction. Knowledge of meta-discourse can also be used to improve students’ language proficiency. However, there is not enough studies done on the effect of meta-discourse on reading. What’s more, nearly all of them are conducted in universities. This thesis extends knowledge of meta-discourse into reading instruction in an ordinary high school. It aims to provide some inspirations for reading instruction.Reading is so important that we can’t neglect in both language teaching and language learning.Although teachers and students spare quite a lot of time in reading, some senior high school students still have problems in reading. A phenomenon caught teachers’ attention. Some students have reached a phrase which is called bottleneck. Although they spend a lot of time in English learning, they get relative low and stable scores in reading test. To improve students’ reading proficiency effectively, meta-discourse was introduced into classroom teaching.The thesis tries to explore its influence on students’ reading comprehension proficiency. Therefore an experiment was conducted in a senior high school. Two natural classes of Senior Two were chosen as subjects of the experiment. One is regarded as experimental class and the other is the control class. Pretest was conducted to see whether there is a difference between the two groups. They share the same book,same teacher and same curriculum. The two classes had relative the same level of reading proficiency before the experiment. Then theories of meta-discourse has been integrated into the instruction of reading in the experimental class. The teacher spent time on the appreciation and explanation of meta-discourse markers in the experimental class. Inductive methods are adopted in the impart ion of meta-discourse.While the control class have no classes about knowledge of meta-discourse. The whole experiment had been carried for one semester.(14weeks) Finally a post-test was taken in both the experimental class and control class.Then all the scores are employed for data analysis by SPSS 19.0. Independent samples tests were done to compare two classes’ reading proficiency before and after the experiment. Paired samples tests were taken to demonstrate the changes made by two classes during the experiment.It has been testified that meta-discourse do play a positive impact on senior high students’ reading proficiency. Then ANOVA analysis aims to see students on which level of reading proficiency made the greatest improvement. The results show that obvious differences are found among three levels of reading proficiency. Students who have relative low reading proficiency made the greatest improvement during the experiment. Then follows students with intermediate reading proficiency. The last are students who have relatively high reading proficiency. Putting meta-discourse into reading teaching by more teachers is advisable. This thesis also pays attention to the effective impart ion of meta-discourse to senior high school students.