RST Theory As A New Approach To Solving Reading Comprehension Questions Of "Choosing Five Out Of Seven Alternatives"

In recent years,China's national college entrance examination policy has been undergoing a major reform and Fujian,along with many other provinces across the country,has taken measures to cope with the emerging new situation so as to help the students to deal with new designs of national college entrance test papers.In dealing with the newly instituted "choosing five out of seven alternatives" type of reading comprehension question in the subject of English test paper,which students have tended to find especially tough and challenging,most teachers still resort to traditional methods and guidelines for improving reading comprehension skills,and students by and large stick to their old problem-solving style as well.As a result,the difficulties encountered regarding this new question type remain,and the students' efforts to adapt to "choosing five out of seven alternatives" questions have met with less success than has been expected.The year of 2017 will be the second year for Fujian province to use the national test papers.To help students adapt to the new question type as soon as possible and thus to usher in a significant change for the better to the current situation,research on the"choosing five out of seven alternatives" scoring methods and strategies is critical.Bitzer(1971)had pointed.out that rhetorical research can include philosophy,history,criticism,demonstration,creation[literature]and education(quoted from LiuYameng,2004:1-7).That,in turn,as a coalition of linguistics and rhetoric,Rhetorical Structure Theory(referred to as RST henceforth)is a kind of great tool and means to explore education.RST is a theory about discourse generation and analysis based on the framework of Systemic Functional Theory,which is founded by American scholars W.C.Mann and S.A.Thompson in the early 1980s.And it has already been widely applied in many areas such as psycholinguistics,computational linguistics,cross-language research,writing research and so on(Taboada&Mann,2006a,b).According to RST,textual elements are not randomly organized,rather,they are interconnected with each other through logical and semantic relations that have been named Rhetorical Structure Relations.A lot of scholars at home and foreign have already conducted researches on the application of RST in reading comprehension of English,their findings have proved that RST could function as a useful guide to English reading.However,there is as yet little research about its application in solving reading comprehension questions in test papers,not to mention in solving the new question type "choose five out of seven alternatives." Whether and how RST could extend its application to these areas is what this paper undertakes to find out.During her internship in teaching two Freshman classes in Fuzhou No.15 high school,the author of this paper conducted an experiment of applying RST to solving test questions.A questionnaire was first designed to make a thorough inquiry about the existing problems in students' handling of "choosing five out of seven alternatives"reading comprehension questions.On the basis of these findings,the author called attention to the rhetorical structure relations functioning in each exercise of reading comprehension,and provided guidance for applying RST to solving the "choosing five out of seven alternatives" in particular.Then through instructions and drills,a new and more effective way to improve students' scores in dealing with this question type has emerged.Though still tentative,the new RST-guided method looks very promising.