Application of Discourse Analysis in Senior High School English
Reading Teaching
Thesis statement: The combination of cohesion and coherence, macro analysis and micro analysis means of discourse analysis theory with English reading teaching is of great significance and feasibility for guiding senior high school English reading.
Introduction
A.Research background
i.Importance of English reading
With the increasing demand of global big data network communication, English communication has become the mainstream, which plays an increasingly important role in the world today. At present, language teaching attaches great importance to students' communicative ability in the actual situation. Therefore, reading teaching has become the core and main body of English teaching in senior high school.
However, the focus of English curriculum reform is discourse, we should pay attention to the acquisition, arrangement and integration of language and cultural knowledge. In The New Senior High School English Curriculum Standards (2017, 23), the premise of cultivating language use ability is discourse knowledge. It plays a very important role in understanding and expressing English. In recent years, the importance of cultivating English reading competence has been gradually reflected in the English test questions of college entrance examination all parts of the country. Taking Shanxi college entrance examination as an example, the questions of English examination papers are mainly in the form of reading, such as reading comprehension, cloze filling, grammar filling, error correction and writing. As the same time, its examination form and purpose are also changing: from finding out the main idea of the article to correctly inferring the relevant content, from directly investigating the understanding of the sentence to grasping the understanding of the whole chapter. Research shows that these exam subjects are based on reading comprehension , and its aim is to examine the reading ability of students. Students’ reading speed is not only required to meet certain standards in the college entrance examination , but also puts forward higher requirements in the breadth and depth of understanding. Obviously, English
discoursereading is an extremely useful and important skill for modern high school students.
ii.Problems of traditional teaching model of English reading
For a long time, influenced by exam oriented education, teachers' English reading teaching mode is too single, and the teaching content is too modeled, which makes the improvement of students' reading ability become a bottleneck. According to the cognition and thinking of the current English teaching mode , the main problems are summarized as follows:
First, on the one hand, in the process of traditional high school English teaching, the connection between sentences and sentences is usually ignored, and only the teaching of words and sentences is concerned. This leads to a lack of thorough understanding of structure and discourse , so that students can not understand the whole idea of the full text. On the other hand, students are inseparable from the dictionary during reading and cannot independently solve various problems encountered in reading, which enables students to remember only a few phrases and syntax after learning an article. They cannot understand the author's writing purpose as a whole and lack the ability to summarize paragraphs.
Second, because the new textbook involves many contents and complex structure, the teaching task is quite heavy. In the face of the trouble, some teachers only teach the key points, while others do not.
It violates the principle of cultivating students' all-round development in the concept of New Curriculum reform.
Thirdly, the traditional teaching methods are too strict and many teachers follow the guidance of teaching materials too much. Classroom teaching only pays attention to the form and can not fully present the significance of cooperative, which is harmful to the cultivation of students' independent thinking and innovative thinking.
All these indicate that this traditional teaching method is against the concept of the New Curriculum Standards of Senior High School. Therefore, English reading teaching can start from the perspective of discourse analysis, combined with the context to understand and master the function of the discourse, so as to improve students' English reading ability.
iii.Necessity of application of discourse analysis in the teaching of English reading
To sum up, learning English passage not only requires students to master difficulties words, phrase and syntactic structures, but also to grasp the whole passage, which is what we need to know. In other words, students can analyze the structure of the passage to find out the cohesion
and coherence of the article and the author's writing intention. The English Curriculum Standard for Senior High School (2017) requires students to meet the following standards when they graduate: understanding the attitude and viewpoint of reading materials; identifying the genre characteristics of reading materials; understanding the long and difficult sentences in the text; analyzing the sentence structure; and appreciating the literary works with lower difficulty. In the traditional English reading teaching mode, these high standards are difficult to achieve. Therefore, we must introduce the teaching mode of discourse analysis so that students can gradually discover the regulation of discourse and improve their reading comprehension.
B.Significance and purpose of the study
As mentioned above, the traditional English teaching model has various disadvantages. Therefore, in order to realize the standards of the New English Curriculum in senior high school, this dissertation combines the theory of discourse analysis with the current situation of English reading teaching to improve students' reading ability. Discourse analysis starts with a complete article, so as to achieve the purpose of understanding the article, analyzing the structure and evaluating the article. Language form, language function and cultural background involved in the article will be given due attention, so as to cultivate students' good reading habits and reading comprehension ability (Yang Guohua, 2009).
Therefore, applying the theory of discourse analysis to reading teaching plays an important role in improving teachers' comprehensive qualities and training students' English ability. This teaching method can help students to understand the structure of the text and master the use of words and grammar, thereby helping students improve their reading habits and reading ability.
C.Framework of the study
This dissertation is divided into five parts. The first part not only introduces the theoretical background of this study and analyzes it in three aspects, but also explains the purpose and significance of the study. The second part summarizes the relevant theoretical concepts to be followed in this study, focusing on the concepts of discourse and discourse analysis as well as the research status at home and abroad. The third part expounds the three theoretical foundations based on discourse analysis and its application classroom teaching. The fourth part studies the reading teaching mode based on discourse analysis theory, and analyzes its positive effect. This is of great significance for the effective use of discourse analysis in English classes. The fifth part
summarizes the conclusions and deficiencies of this study, and puts forward some new ideas for future research.
I.Literature Review
A.Definition of discourse and discourse analysis
i.Definition of discourse
In the works of different experts and scholars, discourse has different meanings. Halliday regards discourse as a language unit. He believes that we can learn from the method of studying sentences to study discourse, and with this method we can get a set of mature grammar about discourse. Cook (1989:156) holds that discourse is "a series of meaningful and complete languages serving a certain purpose." Widdowson (1996:38) defined it as "the language form that can be used in oral and written communication for the purpose of obtaining meaning." Hu Zhuanglin (1994) holds that discourse refers to a language with complete meaning in a certain context, which is not restricted by grammar. Generally speaking, a discourse consists of one or more sentence groups, and the various components are connected to each other, which is that they are cohesion in forms and coherence in semantics. Therefore, in English reading teaching, we must focus on the overall understanding of the text.
ii.Definition of discourse analysis
Discourse analysis is usually an analysis of the language in use. Since the 1950s, Harris firs issues articles and initiated the concept of discourse analysis. After that, it has gradually become one of the most basic and worthy of study in linguistics and expanded into an independent discipline. Hu Zhuanglin (2001) pointed out in The Application of Discourse Analysis in Teaching that "discourse analysis is a process that enables readers to effectively analyze the meaning of language in text, and to identify the structural patterns of language and various linguistics means of forming structural patterns." Discourse analysis is a micro and macro study of the whole meaning of a text. Micro research is a means to understand textual cohesion by explaining new words, analyzing syntactic structure and distinguishing the relationship between sentences. Macro research is to grasp its profound meaning by analyzing the structure of the text.The language materials in the compulsory English textbook of senior high school that we are using now are all typical texts, which creates a good precondition for us to apply discourse analysis theory to
reading teaching.
iii. Discourse cohesion and coherence
Cohesion and coherence, as two vital terms of discourse linguistics, express different meaning in discourse analysis.
Halliday first proposed the concept of cohesion in 1964. After the book “Cohesion in English” was published, cohesion really become the term of textual linguistics commonly used by many linguists. But for the definition of cohesion and coherence, many linguists at home and abroad have given different definitions. Hoey (1991, cited in Liu Chensheng, 1999) thinks that cohesion is a means and way to connect two sentences. As for coherence, Nunan (1991) thinks that coherence makes readers think of the text as a whole rather than a simple pile up of sentences without logic. Liu Chensheng's explanation is more illustrative: he thinks that cohesion is an important means of connecting sentences in a text as a whole to create coherence.
As can be seen from the above, cohesion and coherence are important features of a complete discourse, but there are essential differences between them. Cohesion refers to the objective structure of the text, while coherence involves the subjective connotation of the entire text. As coherence is one of the most basic features of a text, the author tries to create a coherent text, while the reader understands and recognizes the text as a coherent text.
B.The concrete connotation of discourse analysis theory
i.Macro analysis
The macro analysis of a text is mainly reflected in identifying the core sentences, analyzing the structure of the article, mastering the theme of the text, the author's position and views and writing intention, with the purpose of understanding the theme of the text from a deep level. Macro analysis of discourse emphasizes that different methods should be adopted according to different genres of discourse. There are three methods for macro analysis of discourse:
(1)Genre Analysis:
There are many ways to classify genres. The analysis of the text from the perspective of genre helps us to control the context of the text from a macro perspective.
Hu Zhuanglin (2001) believed that by guiding students to analyze the organizational structure of different types of texts and the logical relationship between paragraphs. It can cultivate students' ability of predicting the style and the main idea. Therefore, teachers should lead students

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