Discourse Analysis and the Teaching of English Rea

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作者：成青苗

来源：《商情》2009年第11期

        Abstract:This paper is first to discuss the nature of reading and then enumerate some typical errors in students' English reading, and finally propose some advice on the teaching of English reading from the angle of discourse analysis.

        Keywords:discourse analysis English reading

        1 What is reading

        Reading is an essential skill for English as a foreign language(EFL) student. It is an active skill which constantly involves guessing, predicting, and checking and asking oneself questions. Meaning does not reside on the printed page, nor is only in the head of the reader, but is extracted by combining the words on the printed page with the readers' background knowledge and experiences.

        Understanding the process of reading has been the focus of much research. Models have been proposed by these researchers. They can be divided into three categories: bottom-up models, top-down models and interactive models. Bottom-up or data-driven models depend primarily on the information. Segal Owitz, Poulsen & Komoda (1991) indicated that these lower-level processes consist of word recognition and include visual recognitions of letter features, letter identification, generation of grapheme-phoneme correspondences, utilization of orthographic redundancies such as regularities in letter sequences, the association of words to the semantic representations, possibly the identification of basic syntactic structures within the portion of text currently being read, and with the generation of propositional units(p.17). As for top-down models, Segal Owitz, Poulsen & Komoda (1991) point out that this higher level is concerned primarily with integration of textual information and includes resolving ambiguities in the text, linking words with their co-referents, integrating propositional units across sentences, generating and updating a schema or representation of the text as a whole, and integrating textual information with prior knowledge(P.17). Interactive models which combine elements of both bottom-up and top-down models are currently accepted as the most comprehensive description of the reading process. Stanovich states that in interactive models "process at any level can compensate for deficiencies at any other level Higher processes can actually compensate for deficiencies in low-level processes."(Stanovich,1980,p36) Grabe(1991) emphasizes two conceptions of interactive approaches. The first relates to the interaction that occurs between the reader and the text. This suggests that meaning does not simply reside in the text itself but that as readers interact with text their own background knowledge facilitates the task of comprehending. The second conception of interactive approaches relates to the interaction between bottom-up and top-down processes.(p378)

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