An Investigation Of Discourse Awareness In Senior High School English Reading Teaching

English reading is an important way of language input.The ultimate goal of high school English reading is to improve students' comprehensive language competence.Reading teaching should improve students' thinking ability through students' reading and thinking.In this process,students' discourse awareness is particularly important.As is seen in the study of the current situation of English reading teaching in senior high school,teachers are always guided by examination which lead to the phenomenon that they pay more attention to the explanation and practice of the grammar in reading materials and neglect grasping the text's structure and the author's writing intention.This kind of teaching goes against the cultivation of students' discourse awareness and the development of their comprehensive language competence.The English Curriculum Criterion for Senior High School(Draft)(hereinafter referred to as ECC)has clear requirements on students' discourse reading ability.The requirements are: students are able to guess the meaning of words according to context and sentence structure;to predict the development of plot based on textual clues;to understand the main idea and the author's writing intention;to overcome the difficulties caused by new words and understand the textual meaning;to make inference through the context clues etc.The study consulted the relevant literature on discourse awareness in senior high school English teaching,and investigated the status quo of English reading discourse awareness in senior high school through questionnaire,interview and classroom observation.The results were analyzed by SPSS and Excel.The study investigated350 students from three schools in Ganzhou City,interviewed 12 teachers and observed 20 reading classes.The teachers and students who were investigated were selected by stratified sampling and random sampling,thus they were representative.The study attempts to solve the following questions:(1)what's the status quo of students' discourse awareness in senior high school? And which aspects need to be improved?(2)What cause the existing problems?(3)What are the effective ways to improve students' discourse awareness?As is seen in the results of questionnaire and classroom observation,the mainproblems of discourse awareness in senior high school English reading teaching are as follows:(1)students' discourse awareness is weak;(2)students are not aware of the importance of discourse awareness;(3)students' knowledge of discourse analysis is limited;(4)students pay too much attention to language points but ignore discourse reading.The author made an in-depth analysis of the reasons which cause the existing problems through interview and classroom observation,the main causes are as follows:(1)teachers pay little attention to the cultivation of students' discourse awareness and they seldom implement discourse teaching;(2)Students are lack of discourse strategies and they do not form a good habit of discourse reading;(3)the contents on discourse in reading test are insufficient and the ways of testing need to be improved.Based on the analysis of the status quo and the reasons which cause the problems,in order to enhance students' discourse awareness and promote their comprehensive language competence,the author puts forward the following suggestions:(1)Strengthening teachers' discourse awareness;(2)Cultivating students' reading strategies and laying particular emphasis on their discourse;(3)Perfecting the contents in reading test and improving the ways of testing and fulfilling the ECC.Through the investigation,analysis and reflection on the discourse awareness of high school English reading teaching,this study provides a reference for reading teaching,aiming to enhance students' discourse awareness in English reading and to improve reading teaching.