A Case Study On Reading Teaching In Senior High School Exemplary English Lessons Based On Discourse Analysis

This thesis reports a study of discourse teaching based on the discourse analysis theory.Three aspects of discourse teaching will be discussed by this research:discourse context,discourse cohesion and coherence,and discourse structure.The purpose is to investigate different types of discourse teaching in exemplary lessons based on discourse analysis theory,and to provide some suggestions for English teachers on discourse instruction.Three aspects of discourse teaching will be discussed by this research.The subjects involved in this study are 8 videos of high school English exemplary lessons in the 11 th Senior High School English Classroom Teaching Observation and Training held in Xiamen 2018,including four kinds of discourse types: narration,argumentation,exposition and practical discourse,two videos of each type.The researcher does observation of teachers instruction of discourse by watching the videos of these eight exemplary lessons and then analyze the three aspects(discourse context,discourse cohesion and coherence and discourse structure)of these eight lessons based on the observation scale.The results are discussed from three aspects: discourse context,discourse cohesion and coherence and discourse structure.Firstly,on the basis of the observation of teachers’ instruction,seven of the eight teachers give instruction on the discourse context.These seven teachers all use the method of predicting discourse content based on discourse context,no teachers adopt the way of “predict the discourse context based on the discourse content”.Secondly,four of the eight teachers instruct students with discourse cohesion and coherence.The four teachers use these four cohesion and cohesive devices respectively: pronouns and other cohesive words,discourse markers,transitional sentence,and first and key sentences.No teachers notice of role of implicit discourse cohesion and coherence techniques.Thirdly,seven of the eight teachers instruct discourse structure,six of them instruct the discourse structure according to discourse type.Four of the six teachers guide students to explore the semantic and logical relationship of the discourse components.The suggestions are also given around three aspects.For instructing discourse context,teachers need to combine the activation of students’ background knowledge with the presentation of new content,activate different schema and predict the discourse context based on discourse content.For instructing discourse cohesion and coherence,teachers should attach importance to the instruction of implicit technique,and pay attention to use a variety of cohesion and coherence devices.For instructing discourse structure,teachers should highlight the features of the structures of different discourse types,and pay attention to the semantic and logical relationship among the components of a discourse.