A Study On The Cultivation Of English Reading Thinking Quality Of High School Students Based On Discourse Analysis Theory

It is clear from reading General High School English Curriculum Standards(Revised Edition 2020)that it is very important to enhance students’ core English literacy.In the subject of English,the core literacy that students need to enhance mainly includes language literacy,cultural literacy,thinking quality and learning ability.Thinking quality,as one of the main components,is closely related to students’ ability to solve problems independently.Improving students’ logical,critical and creative thinking quality through English reading comprehension teaching is the primary way to cultivate students’ thinking quality.However,in the current high school English reading teaching model,teachers only focus on the different scores students acquire.Teaching emphasis is mainly on words and grammar,therefore reading teaching is rather fragmented,neglecting cultivation of students’ thinking quality.In addition,the New Curriculum Standards also puts forward the importance of Discourse Analysis Theory,so students should master the knowledge of discourse to a certain extent and fully apply it to their daily reading and answering questions,which requires teachers to take advantage of Discourse Analysis Theory in their daily English reading comprehension teaching and make in-depth interpretation of the discourse.Therefore,this paper will explore effective ways of using discourse analysis to cultivate students’ thinking quality through the teaching of English reading in high schools,and then put forward effective teaching suggestions.This study is based on Discourse Analysis Theory,Intelligence Theory Focusing on the Structure of Thinking and Testing Task Characteristics Theory.It takes 100 students of a high school in H city of Heilongjiang province and four high school English teachers as the research subjects,and also uses questionnaire survey method,text analysis method,classroom observation method and interview method,focusing on the following three questions: Firstly,what is the current state of students’ thinking quality in a high school in H city? Secondly,based on students’ thinking quality level,analyzing what have been the dimensions of testing students’ thinking quality in English reading discourses in College Entrance Examination in the past ten years? Thirdly,how to apply Discourse Analysis Theory to improve students’ thinking quality in English reading teaching?The study found that,by analyzing the results of students’ pre-test thinking quality questionnaires and teachers’ interviews,students easily neglected to exercise their thinking quality in their daily English learning.They only pay attention to the answers to test questions without in-depth thinking about the type and structure of discourse,which affects their thinking quality.Teachers,on the other hand,do not fully use the discourse analysis method in their daily reading teaching because of the limited classroom time and other reasons,resulting in problems such as single perspective of discourse interpretation and lack of correlation and integration of discourse information.Based on the framework of test task characteristics and the theory of discourse analysis,the author presents an analysis of the English reading comprehension test question in College Entrance Examination in terms of four dimensions,namely,discourse type,subject context,subject key ability and thinking quality,from the perspectives of discourse input and expected response.Meanwhile,the four dimensions are used as observation points in the English reading classroom,and it is found that only a small number of teachers consciously use discourse analysis to analyse the content and thinking quality in the discourses when teaching English reading exercises.Through the analysis of students’ post-test questionnaire data,a semester of classroom observation and interviews with teachers and students,it can be known that students’ thinking quality has been improved in three dimensions: logic,criticality and innovation.Teachers’ Discourse Analysis Theory when explaining English reading comprehension questions in College Entrance Examination has a certain effect on cultivating students’ thinking quality.It is clear that using discourse analysis in reading comprehension is an effective way to improve students’ thinking quality.The author proposes teaching suggestions from both macro and micro levels of discourse analysis in the hope that teachers can consciously integrate knowledge of discourse analysis methods into the teaching of English reading and cultivate students’ thinking quality in a planned and systematic way.