A Study On The Application Of Discourse Analysis To English Summary Writing Teaching In Senior High School

The New Curriculum Standard for High School English(the "New Curriculum")issued by the Ministry of Education in the year 2003 describes that one of the English language abilities which should be acquired by a high school student in his English learning includes the ability to write a summary according to the relevant reading material;In our country,some provinces,such as Guangdong and Zhejiang province,have adopted summary writing as the main English writing test in college entrance examination,Summary writing can train and test the comprehensive ability of understanding,judgment,generalization and expression of English learners,which integrates English reading and writing.Discourse analysis,a kind of comparatively effective method,can be helpful to improve students’ summarization and comprehension ability,which attach many educators’ considerable attention,for this,it is necessary to apply discourse analysis and get an effective teaching mode to improve students’ summary writing level.Based on the discourse theory,this thesis aims at investigating the effects of discourse analysis-based approach on senior high school students’ summary writing and tries to deal with the following questions:1)Does discourse analysis-based summary teaching improve the competence of students’ summary writing?2)Do students change their attitudes to English summary writing after discourse analysis-based teaching summary writing?For this reason,the subjects for this experiment are 84 students from two natural classes in senior two of Lanzhou No.52 middle school,among whom 42 students are from Class 4,the experimental class,and 42 students are from Class 3,the control class.The students’ English levels are equal,and the teaching experiment lasts for three months.Both classes were taught the same content except the experimental class instructing the knowledge of discourse analysis.During the experiment,the subjects accept one tutorial hour training courses of summary writing per week.The teacher introduces the knowledge of discourse analysis first,during which the author divided “Writing” into three stages.In pre-writing stage,students are guided to do discourse analysis to the reading passage and get familiar with the discourse characteristics and master some discourse knowledge,which were the prerequisites for summary writing.Students decide on the genre and main idea of the writing passage;in writing period,students develop paragraphs with cohesive and coherent sentences;in post-writing stage,students modify the drafts at both discourse level and sentence level as well.Before the discourse analysis-based approach was used,two English summary writing tests are adopted as the pretests.After the experiment,two other summary writing tests were applied as the post-tests.The summaries of pretest and post-test were rated by two teachers according to the evaluation standards.Questionnaires were also used to collect qualitative and quantitative data.SPSS 20.0 software is adopted to analyze the data.And the following conclusions are reached through the analysis and discussion of the collected data:(1)the application of discourse analysis theory in teaching English summary writing can enhance students’ competence in English summary writing.(2)Students hold positive attitudes to English summary writing after the application of discourse analysis theory in English summary writing.They also believe the method is helpful for their summary writing to some extent.This study,which is from the perspective of discourse analysis,explores the teaching method of English summary writing to help students improve summary writing ability.Though there are the limitations of this study,some implications for teaching practice and suggestions for further study were proposed at the end of the thesis.