A Study Of Applying Discourse Markers In Junior High School English Reading Teaching

With the new curriculum reform developing and the globalization accelerating, learning English is becoming more and more important. Among the five basic skills of English, reading is an efficient bridge between input and output information in the process of learning. Compared with the past, students have more ways to learn English. It is also a reason that students’ English levels have a polarization. Otherwise, some teachers still use traditional ways to teach English reading such as paying attention to words, expressions and grammars and so on and neglecting the importance of discourse, so students have low text awareness and slow reading speed and so on. According to this situation, discourse markers are used in reading. Many strategies (rehearsal strategy, elaborative strategy, organizational strategy and so on) are applied to improve students’English reading competence.Through searching all sorts of relevant datum, many scholars at home and abroad have made many researches about discourse markers in oral English, listening, reading and writing and so on, especially for vocational school students and college students, but few scholars do researches in which junior high school students in China are chosen as experimental subjects. According to this situation, it is necessary for junior high school students to do the research about applying discourse markers in English reading. Contacting with junior high school students’special characteristics, it is useful to make them have a deeper understanding of English discourses, to cultivate their predictive ability about discourse, to improve their reading efficiency and to make them become interested in English reading.Experimental subjects are the students in No.9 junior high school in Xinyang. After some tests and investigations, Class 6 in Grade 8 is chosen as control class and Class 7 is experiment class. In teaching experiment, questionnaire survey, pretest and post-test are mainly used, in order to collect relevant research data. Through SPSS software, differences between students’ English reading proficiency before and after teaching experiment are showed and it proved that students’ scores in English reading competence have improved a lot after they use discourse markers in reading. Thus, in the future, English teachers can apply discourse markers in reading class to help improve students’ reading comprehension.This thesis is divided into six chapters. Chapter one, introduction is about research background, research purpose and significance and structure of the thesis. Chapter two, literature review presents an introduction to the history and the status quo of studies of applying discourse markers to teaching English reading in our country and other countries. Chapter three, theoretical basis shows discourse analysis theory and functions of discourse markers and the relationship between discourse markers and English reading comprehension. Chapter four is applications of discourse markers in English reading teaching in junior high school. It involves present situations about English reading teaching in junior high school and strategies of applying discourse markers in English reading teaching. Chapter five is teaching experiment. It contains experiment subjects, experiment hypothesis, experiment tools, experiment procedures and analysis and discussion. Chapter six, conclusion is about main findings, teaching implications and limitations and suggestions.