A Study On The Effects Of Discourse Awareness Training On Students' English Reading Comprehension Competence In Senior High Schools

This study mainly makes an empirical study on the effects of discourse awareness training on the reading comprehension competence of senior high school students.The importance of the discourse theory in English teaching has been widely recognized,with discourse awareness greatly improved.The over-emphasis on language forms in teaching has decreased,but there is little research on how to systematically train students' discourse awareness and its impacts.The corresponding teaching evaluation system is not perfect.Halliday,Jing Feipeng and other researchers have made much research on discourse consciousness and English reading,which shows that this research has certain feasibility and value.The innovation of this research is to simultaneously evaluate students' discourse awareness and discourse comprehension in reading comprehension,to obtain comprehensive information on students'discourse awareness and reading ability,and to analyze the experimental results in detail.This paper mainly studies the following problems based on cohesion theory and schema theory:1)What are the effects of the discourse awareness on senior high school students' reading comprehension competence?2)What are the effects of the discourse awareness training on senior high school students'English reading proficiency?This study selects two parallel classes,with 110 students in total,from Grade Three in a senior high school in Yueyang,Hunan Province as the participants.Before the experiment,the pre-tests of discourse ability and reading comprehension competence test verify that there is no significant difference between the two classes.The study uses the exercises designed by Fan(2013)and Wang(2017),to measure the degrees of participants' English discourse ability.In the Factor Analysis of the pre-test questionnaires data,there are four subscales of English discourse ability being analyzed:Textual Reference,Ellipsis,Conjunctions,Lexical Connections,Sentence Relations and Context.These two classes are randomly appointed as the experiment class and the control class.The Discourse Awareness Training Approach is used in the experiment class and the traditional reading teaching method is used in the control class.The teaching experiment lasts 3 weeks.After the experiment,the post-tests of the reading comprehension exercises test and the English discourse ability test are conducted and the results are collected and analyzed in SPSS24.0.The statistical analysis of the data was carried out by independent sample T test,correlation analysis and paired sample T test.As is shown in the results,(1)The training of English reading discourse awareness can improve the English reading discourse competence of senior high school students.The two factors affect each other;(2)Students' English reading discourse awareness training can improve the English reading level of senior high school students.In the reading teaching,teachers should specially train students' English reading discourse knowledge and their awareness,which is useful to cultivate students' awareness of reading discourse and thus improve their reading level.Cohesion theory and Schema theory are important in the cultivation of discourse awareness in English reading.In the teaching of English reading,the cultivation of students' awareness of English reading discourse is based on the cultivation of cohesion and coherence awareness in English reading.All in all,the number of the questionnaires is a small sample,and there are no students from other provinces,which has certain geographical limitations.Moreover,due to the limitations of my research level,there are still many deficiencies in the depth and breadth of the research.For those objective reasons,it is inevitable that this study needs to be further developed in the future teaching practice.