英语论文网

nderstanding of words and grammar, but they are morelikely to develop a bad habit to read word by word at a slow speed, gaining only part ofthe comprehension, and they pay too much attention to the isolated. Under this kind ofreading model, students play a passive role with no particular reading purpose in mindand fail to focus on the important facts about the material they read. The phenomenonbecomes more apparent when they read a longer text.
In contrast to bottom-up models, some teachers apply top-down models in readingclass. Since top-down models hold the view that the fluent readers should be activelyengaged in hypothesis testing while he is proceeding through text (Stanovich, 1980),teachers usually try to activate students’ background knowledge at the very beginningof a class. They focus on increasing students’ background knowledge and improvingtheir ability to predict from context. The students are expected to perform and processactively by confirming or correcting their predictions about the text as they read on.Under the circumstances, the reader’s background knowledge rather than the text itselfis regarded as the key factor to comprehension. Therefore, vocabularies and grammarsare mostly neglected and the fact that linguistic forms employed in a discourse doencode some information is also ignored.

Chapter 2.Literature Review

In this chapter, we will review some previous studies on discourse analysis whichin some aspects have instructive significance in the study of reading teaching at present,including the definition, some basic theories and their implication to reading teaching.We will focus on the detail of text structures, cohesion and context theories and theirapplication to reading teaching.

2.1. Discourse and Discourse Analysis

2.1.1. Discourse and Its Nature
Discourse is a widely used concept in linguistic studies. Linguists have noagreement in the definition of this term. The classic definition is from the structuralperspective given by Stubbs (1983: 1) as “language above the sentence or above theclause”. In his view, discourse is a complex linguistic form of relevant sentences largerrather than a single sentence. With a high level of abstraction, this definition is notproper for study but gives enlightenment to the studies of discourse. From thefunctionally viewpoint, more scholars（Halliday & Hason, 1976） argue that discourseis a series of contextualized units of language use. Halliday and Hason (1976) viewdiscourse as a semantic unit. In other words, discourse is not the unit of forms, but ofmeanings. Schiffrin even says that “discourse is a socially and culturally organizedsystem through which particular functions are realized” (Schiffrin, 1995:32). Later,researchers have put discourse into a wider perspective. In the enlightenment ofsociology, Cook (1989) asserts that discourse is co-related with social life. Van Dijk(1997) believes that discourse should include three aspects: language use, thoughttransmission and communication in the social context.

Chapter 3. Research Methodology........ 34-51
    3.1. Research Questions........ 34
    3.2. Subjects........ 34
    3.3. Instruments........ 34-38
        3.3.1. Questionnaire........ 35
       本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。