An Experimental Study On High School Reading Teaching Based On The Theory Of Register

In the current English reading teaching in China, the traditional lexico-grammar method is used the most broadly. This method emphasizes the explanation of vocabulary and grammar on class, and students are asked to do a lot of rote memory to accumulate enough linguistic knowledge so that they can improve their reading comprehension ability. A lot of research has proved that the students can only get fragmental information from a discourse in this way. In other word, the students are usually unclear about the purpose of the text and how the text is organized by the writer. As a result, their reading motives decline and grow a reverse psychology towards reading. So it is obviously in need to find a new way to teach English reading in high school. The present study proposes a new teaching design based on Halliday’s Register Theory for the purpose of improving the teaching efficiency of high school reading teaching.Halliday thinks register consists of three elements: field, tenor and mode, and these three elements can be realized on the lexico-grammar level of language. So by analyzing the lexico-grammar level of a discourse, a reader can know the register of it. And then the reader can predict the information of the discourse. In other words, these two levels can be predicted mutually based on the analysis of the other. This could be connected with David E.Rulnelhart’s Interactive mode of reading. The interactive mode thinks reading needs two kings of knowledge. On the one hand, the basic linguistic knowledge is needed in reading comprehension; on the other hand, background knowledge is needed, too. Reading comprehension happens between the constant interaction between the information a reader gaining from the text with basic linguistic knowledge and the background knowledge he holds. According to the Register Theory and the Interactive Mode of reading, the present study proposes a new English reading teaching design in high school and carries out an experiment to prove it is more efficient than the tradition lexico-grammar method.The experiment is carried out in BAISHITANG EDUCATION Private School in GuiYang City. Two high school Grade 2 classes are randomly chosen to be the subjects. The experiment lasts about four months. A pre-test and a post-test are taken by both the experimental class and the control class to collect data. At the end of the experiment, the data are analyzed with the SPSS 19.0 software. The results of the experiment proves that the present reading teaching design is more efficient than the traditional way on improving high school students’ reading ability.