Application Of Textual Pattern To English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

In the New National English Curriculum Standards(Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China,2003)for senior high school students,the requirements of reading ability are listed.Recently,the purposes of reading teaching are to help develop students' reading ability and make them obtain the capability of reading rapidly and effectively.Besides,testing questions of reading comprehension in College Entrance Exam Paper are designed in a new perspective: aiming at testing students' discourse awareness and their reading abilities,focusing on understanding the whole discourse comprehensively.And then does reading teaching focus on the cultivation of students' discourse awareness as well as the improvement of reading abilities? By consulting literature and questionnaires,it is found that students know little about discourse knowledge,letting alone applying them into reading.In the meanwhile,their reading abilities and achievements are not satisfying.Based on the discourse organization theory which is stated by Liu Chendan(1999),the inseparable relationship between reading and discourse theory can be found.Therefore,it is reasonable to make an attempt to apply discourse knowledge into reading teaching.Application of textual pattern knowledge into reading teaching is to cultivate students' discourse awareness and competence,so the textual pattern knowledge can help them understand and grasp textual pattern,genre,text type and so on,thus understanding the text comprehensively and successfully achieving interaction of the author and the discourse.This study is aiming at investigating how textual pattern teaching facilitates English reading course in senior high school.The study focuses on analyses of students' changes in the following two aspects: comprehension proficiency and readers' attitude toward reading.The author finds that the knowledge of macro-text,such as mode,genre,and pattern,can facilitate the application of English reading and there are no empirical studies which aim systematically to investigate the influence of textual pattern on reading comprehension proficiency and readers' attitude.Besides,lack of sensitivity to structural information of texts is stated as one of the factors that leads to comprehension difficulties.Too much attention is paid to words,phrases and grammars,while understanding the meaning of the whole text is subordinate.Thus,it's very important and necessary to help students raise their discourse awareness,which is vital in terms of English reading.Therefore,there are six types of textual patterns which are selected and applied in the study.They are problem-solution pattern,question-answer pattern,general-specific pattern,claim-counterclaim pattern,narrative pattern,one-embedded-another textual pattern.The author conducts a study to test how much textual pattern contributes to students' comprehension proficiency and to describe students' attitude with the comparison of traditional reading teaching.In order to prove that textual pattern teaching can improve the students' English reading comprehension proficiency and readers' attitude in senior high school,the author wants to conduct an experiment in Qin'an No.1 Middle School where she teaches.The research subjects in the experiment are 100 students from two classes in Senior 1 in Qin'an No.1 Middle School in Tianshui,which are divided into Controlled Class(CC)and Experimental Class(EC)randomly.There are 50 students in control class and 50 students in experimental class.This study takes questionnaire,pre-test,post-test to do this experiment in one term.The author instructs reading with textual pattern knowledge in EC and without textual pattern knowledge in CC.In the end,the author will have a statistic analysis for the students' reading comprehension scores in the pre-test and the post-test and students' changes in attitude toward reading in questionnaire.Quantitative and qualitative researches are adopted in the study.Findings from the research show that the students' comprehension proficiency in the experimental class is better than that in the control class.Secondly,students in the EC take a more positive attitude towards reading than students in the CC.Therefore,teachers should apply textual pattern teaching in their reading course.Furthermore,teaching model and suggestions are presented by the author.Of course,because the condition and time are limited,this study has some limitations,which remain to be improved in the future.