Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 The Importance of English Reading
In China, English is an important foreign language for students to leam.Reading is the most important component of language competence and the basis oflanguage input. What's more, reading comprehension ability is regarded as the mostimportant skill among listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. ThereforeEnglish reading plays a vital role in English teaching. With strengthened readingskills, readers can make greater progress and attain greater development in allacademic areas. As is known to all, the grades and learning efficiency of students arelargely constrained by their reading comprehension ability in senior high schoolHowever, we master an important skill, not only the aim for an examinationrequirement, but also the purpose for life-long learning and life-long development.But in the present high school English teaching, there are still many teachers intraditional language explanation is given priority, that is to say, identifying wordmeaning from the types of language forms, focusing on the analysis of the syntaxstructure.
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1.2 The Situation of English Reading at Present
In order to get a general understanding of the current situation of Englishreading teaching in senior high school, the author made a survey among 108 students.In this survey, 108 pieces of questionnaire are handed out and 100% of them arecollected. The analysis of the results is listed as following; From Table 1, question 3 is what the reading model is. About 74.51% ofstudents in Class 5 choose A~bottom-up reading model, that is to say, when studentsread the material, they began to read from the beginning to the end, and thenunderstand the whole passage; while, top-down reading model takes up 14.32% inClass 5. They predict the content according to the title and then read the passage oneparagraph after one paragraph. However 8.56% of students integrate A and B tograsp the main idea of the passage; as for the rest of students, they do not know theirreading model, they have no fixed mode. For the other questions of the questionnairebetween 4 and 15, students choose A, B, C and D which stand for always，at times，seldom and no using respectively. Based on Table 1，the author concluded that fewstudents have the awareness of discourse, meanwhile teachers do not apply discourseanalysis reading model in their present class.
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Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.1 The Nature of Reading
Different experts have different definitions on reading. According to LarryA.Harris&B.Smith, “reading is the intellectual and emotional perception of a printedmessage'X Harris&Smith. 1979:5). The definition explains that reading is an activeand constructive process，and that reading needs to expand students’ intellectualenergy. Knenneth Goodman confirms this definition, “Reading is a complex processby which a reader reconstructs, to some degree, a message is encoded by a writer ingraphic language"(Goodman&Niles, 1970:5). In all, reading refers to an intricatepsychological process, during which readers can decipher language from visual input,and then obtain information which is to be closer to what is mentioned by the author. Most readers can achieve the first level of reading comprehension, but if thereaders want to get the last one - appreciative comprehension, the last three qualitiesmust be required. Therefore, readers have the knowledge of two aspects duringreading: one is language points，which includes the structure of vocabulary, syntax，discourse, etc.; the other is some perceptions of the world, that is, backgroundknowledge, technology knowledge, etc If reading exists, there must be twoaspects, otherwise, we can't do anything about reading.
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2.2 Discourse Analysis
In some scholars' books，“discourse” is also regarded as the “text”，the twoterms in English have the same meaning. However, many scholars abroad try todistinguish discourse from the text, text refers to the written language，whilediscourse refers to the spoken language. In Wang Zongyan's book English-ChineseDictionary of Applied Linguistics, text and discourse mean the same. In this thesis,the discourse and the text are equivalent. Discourse analysis derives in the 1950s. In 1952，the American structuralists,Zelling Harris wrote a paper Discourse Analysis.'w'hxch. was published in the journalof Language. Since then, the term “ discourse analysis，，has been familiar with byscholars gradually. A number of researchers stepped into this field and have beenexploring the researches. In Europe, Hartman, Schmidt and other scholars havebegun to work on the discourse analysis. Hartman was interested in some conceptssuch as topic, comment，who caused more attention on the discourse analysis.“ System Functional Grammar" is developed by Halliday(1961)，which is not onlythe analysis of thematic structure of sentences, but also the analysis of relationshipbetween sentence and text.
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Chapter 3 Theoretical Framework........29
3.1 Theories of Discourse Analysis——Schema........29
3.2 Related Theories of Discourse Analysis........ 30
3.2.1 Context ........ 31
3.2.2 Reading Models........ 31
Chapter 4 Experiment Design........ 32
4.1 Hypothesis........ 32
4.2 Subjects........ 33
4.3 Instruments........ 35
4.4 Procedure ........39
Chapter 5 Data Collection and Analysis ........47
5.1 Data Collection........ 47
5.2 Data Analysis of Pre-and Post-tests........ 49
Chapter 5 Data Collection and Analysis
5.1 Data Collection
Data gathered from these students came from two sources: questionnaire and thescores of reading comprehension tests. Their test results were recorded in thefollowing tables.Students held an examination on Reading Comprehension containing fourpassages at the beginning of the new term. The author only chose one class toconfirm the hypothesis, that is Class 5. In Class 5，there are 54 students which weredivided into four levels according to the scores in the tests of reading comprehension.The four degrees are from the points of 26-30，18-24, 10-16 and below 8.After the tests, the author collected all the students' paper and analyzed theresults of paper with the help of different tables，aiming to verify the researchhypothesis before the experiment.First of all, the author collected the data from the pr-test. From this table, thenumber of different degrees could be known clearly. The results of pre-test are shownin Table 2.
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Conclusion
First of all, the passage is considered as a whole discourse, not just languagepoints. And then huge efforts were made to apply the discourse analysis in Englishreading, and instruct students to make full use of them in reading comprehensions.Based on the above activities, the above mentioned research hypothesis was provedthat discourse analysis can help less proficient students to develop the competence ofreading comprehension and find the exact cues to read text. The writer confirms thatdiscourse analysis' application in teaching reading can improve students' ability ofcomprehension, background knowledge and so on.The author also has anotherfinding that，the most important thing is to raise less proficient students' confidencein reading comprehension. They are more willing to read the text materials. Atpresent, they can leam language points from the context, and read the readingmaterials. They also try to analyze the author's writing intention and elaborate theirown ideas.
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Reference (omitted)