A Study On The Application Of Discourse Analysis Theory In Reading Teaching In Junior High School

In junior high school, the teaching of English reading is considered to be one of the most important elements, because reading is an important skill for students to master English as a foreign language.Teachers always pay attention to cultivating students' reading ability. However, the traditional method applied in reading lesson is not satisfactory in strengthening students' reading ability. Although many different and better teaching methods are discussed and encouraged to be applied in classroom teaching, in many junior high schools especially in rural areas, English reading teaching still focuses on the vocabulary,sentence structure and grammar rules but ignores the discourse which should be analyzed and understood as a whole. This way of reading teaching always has little effect on improving students' reading competence. Base on Discourse Analysis Theory, some discourse analysis-based models of English teaching has been advocated. This kind of method emphasizes on taking the text as a whole.The theory that was introduced in the thesis is the cohesion theory as well as other related theories in the field of discourse analysis. The research tries to answer the following two questions:(1) What is students' using status of discourse analysis strategy in reading learning?(2) Can the reading teaching method based on discourse analysis theory improve students' reading ability in junior high schools? The research instruments include a questionnaire and two reading comprehension tests. In the research, the NO.2 middle school in Dongxiang, Gansu province was taken as an example and the research subjects consist of eighty students from Grade Eight. The research proceeded with the following stages:pre-questionnaire period, pre-test period, teacher intervention, post-test period, post-questionnaire period and data collection period. In order to answer the first research question, a questionnaire was handed out twice for the students. A comparative experiment that lasts 13 weeks was conducted in the research, aiming to verify the effectiveness of the application of discourse analysis theory in reading teaching in junior high school. Two parallel classes were chosen from the school to conduct the experiment. One was taught with the traditional reading teaching method and the other was taught with the application of discourse analysis theory in reading class. The research instruments used in the comparative experiment includes two tests.One is the pre-test to ensure the English reading proficiency of the two classes is not significantly different.And the other one is the post-test to verify the effectiveness of the application of the discourse analysis theory. All the research data is collected by the researcher and analyzed with the aid of SPSS13.0.The major findings of the research are summarized as follows:(1) Junior high school students' using status of discourse analysis strategy in reading learning is not satisfying. They cannot guide their reading learning with the application of discourse analysis theory, although they do show a certain degree of attention on the cohesion devices from the micro level of discourse. After being taught with discourse analysis teaching method, students' performance has a bit of a change. They make some progress in using discourse analysis strategy to guide their reading learning.(2) The reading teaching method based on discourse analysis theory can improve students' reading proficiency in junior high school.The thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter One introduces the research background, research aims and research significance of the thesis. Chapter Two takes a literature review about the related studies on discourse analysis and reading teaching both abroad and at home. Chapter Three present some theories related to discourse analysis. Chapter Four present the research methodology of the thesis, including research questions, research subjects, research instruments and the detailed research procedures. Chapter Five is the results and discussion of the research. The last chapter, Chapter Six provides the research conclusions, including major findings, implications, limitations and suggestions for the future study.