The Effects Of Discourse-analysis Based English Literature Reading Teaching On High School Students' Literary Appreciation Ability

Literature reading,as one of the important composition parts of English learning,can develop students' language ability and thought quality.It attracts researchers and front-line teachers' attention in recent years.However,in the high school English teaching class,most teachers still process the literary work as the non-literary work,they pay more attention to the explanation of words meaning and grammar and relatively ignore the analysis of discourse,which results in students' weak literary appreciation ability.Recently,the problems existing in high school English literature reading are the theme is not fully understood,the character analysis is not comprehensive and the language appreciation is not accurate.In this regard,researchers have constructed various effective teaching modes of English literature reading.Among them,the concept of discourse analysis proposed by Harris(1952)has become the theoretical basis of many English literature reading teaching models.By discourse analysis,learners can recognize the deep intention of the text,trigger their attention to the intention of text creation and then promote their discourse comprehension.Under such background,the author tries to apply discourse-analysis based literature reading model to high school English class,and adopts a mixed methods approach using both quantitative and qualitative analysis to confirm its impact on high school students' literary appreciation ability.It mainly addresses the following three questions:(1)What are the effects of discourse-analysis based literature reading teaching on students' understanding of themes?(2)What are the effects of discourse-analysis based literature reading teaching on students' understanding of characters?(3)What are the effects of discourse-analysis based literature reading teaching on students' appreciation of language description and structure?The experimental subjects are 100 Grade Two students from two parallel classes in an ordinary high school in Huai'an.The author randomly selects one class as the experimental class and the other as the control class.According to two classes' English final test scores in senior one and literature reading pre-test scores,there is no significant difference in English ability of the two classes before the experiment.This study adopts comparative analysis.The traditional five-step teaching mode centered on word meaning and grammar is applied to the comparison class while discourse analysis is applied to the experimental class.Two lesson plans of the same material are designed according to the teaching modes respectively.Literature reading comprehension tests and questionnaire surveys are conducted in two classes respectively.Meanwhile,6 students would be assigned to high-middle and low-English-level groups and complete interviews.All pre-test and post-test data would then be transcribed for qualitative and quantitative analysis.On the basis of data analysis,the author finds that the discourse-analysis based literature reading teaching can improve high school students' literary appreciation ability.In three specific areas,high school students' improvement shows as follows:(1)It can improve students' understanding of themes.The teacher guides students to overall grasp work content,and trains them to quickly locate the paragraphs and key words that reveal the deep meaning of the text and extract the main idea.Due to only three-month experiment period and students' limited reading level,the effect of middle-and-low level students' deep and diversified understanding of themes is not significant.(2)It can improve students' understanding of characters.Most students can reasonably infer the creation intention of characters and the relevance between them based on the text context or relevant background information.The discourse-based three-dimensional analysis of “what-how-why” plays a certain role in promoting students' overall evaluation of characters.(3)It can improve students' appreciation of language description and structure.To guide students to combine macro and micro analysis to divide structure,then to understand the characteristics and functions of literary works' language.Especially for the high-level students,their accuracy and profundity of language appreciation have been significantly improved.Combined with the above findings,it can be concluded that the construction of discourse-analysis based literature reading teaching model is of great value to the senior high schools' English literature reading teaching.In teaching practice,teachers should pay attention to the following points:(1)The role of English literature reading should be fully emphasized in high schools' English reading class.Teachers shouldmake students realize the importance of literary appreciation ability by analyzing the frequency of literary texts and the types of questions in the English reading tests of College Entrance Examination in recent years,so as to lay a foundation for the smooth teaching.(2)Considering high school students' current literature level and limited class teaching time,the teacher should start from the student-oriented thought and choose appropriate literature reading text.Only in this way can we ensure the smooth progress of discourse-analysis based literature reading teaching.(3)This teaching mode has relatively high requirements for both teachers and students.On the one hand,teachers need to systematically master the knowledge of discourse analysis and be able to give in-depth explanation of reading materials' discourse skills in class;On the other hand,through systematic study,students should develop their ability to apply discourse analysis to literature reading independently,so as to improve their literary appreciation ability.(4)During the process,teachers should reflect and evaluate timely,and pay attention to the actual performance of all levels students,especially for the middle-and-low level students,teachers should find their problems timely and provide effective solutions.