An Experimental Research Into Effects Of Reading Teaching Based On Discourse Analysis Upon Students' English Reading Comprehension In Junior Middle Schools

Reading, as one of the four English basic skills, is an important way for students to gain information and acquire a language. It not only provides students with a lot of language learning resources, but also offers an effective way for them to widen their horizon and learn about western cultures. For these reasons, reading teaching plays an essential role in language teaching. In addition, the Curriculum Criteria of Compulsory Education for English has a higher requirement for students. However, the current teaching practice is far from satisfaction. Students read word by word, ignoring the cohesion and coherence of discourse, which results in poor reading comprehension and slow reading speed. Teachers get half the results with double the effort in teaching practice. Therefore, after studying the relevant theories and researches about discourse analysis, the author attempts to explore the effect of reading teaching based on discourse analysis upon students' English reading comprehension in a Junior Middle School.Based on Schema Theory and the relevant theories of discourse analysis, including Cohesion, Textual Patterns and Context Theory, this study attempts to explore how to apply the relevant theories about discourse analysis to reading teaching with an aim to improve the teaching effectiveness. To be more specific, the author tries to propose two research questions: 1) Can reading teaching based on discourse analysis improve students' English reading comprehension? 2) Can reading teaching based on discourse analysis help students develop better reading habits?In order to find out the answers to these two questions, an experimental research lasting for 12 weeks is carried out. Two natural classes at similar English level in Grade Eight at Huadu Chini Middle School are chosen to participate in the study. One is controlled class(CC) and the other is experimental class(EC). In the whole process of teaching, the participants are taught with the same teaching material by the same teacher. The only difference is the teaching instruction. In EC, reading teaching based on discourse analysis is applied while traditional reading teaching method without talking about discourse analysis explicitly is conducted in CC. The instruments of the study include questionnaires and tests. All the data are typed into computer and analyzed by SPSS17.0. The outcome of the post-test confirms that reading teaching based on discourse analysis contributes to improvements of students' reading comprehension. The analysis of the results of two questionnaires indicates that students' reading habits develop gradually in the teaching experiment.The results of the study give us enlightenment that reading teaching based on discourse analysis is feasible and effective. However, how to apply reading teaching based on discourse analysis is the key issue, which needs to be further discussed and studied.