Chapter Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
English reading is one of the important means for people to obtain information, but alsoan approach to exchange ideas. In this information age, grasping effective reading skills to getthe latest information and knowledge plays an extremely important role in learning.According to Carrell (1989), reading is the most important basic skills of the four. Reading isa crucial skill that contributes to language input. People depend on a lot of language input tolearn a language well. So language learners must take enough time to input the targetlanguage. Only in this way will there be better output. Especially for those people who regardEnglish as a foreign language, however, the most common way to get input is through readingbecause of lacking language environment. Obviously, teaching reading lessons becomes veryimportant. As the main input of language learning for senior high school students, readingtakes an important position in the four skills of English. On the one hand, students can extendtheir background knowledge and increase their vocabulary through reading lessons. On theother hand, reading can also help them use authentic language and develop their writing skills.So the ways of teaching reading is directly related to students’ English readingachievements, and reading strategies.Actually, in the vast majority of our reading classes in high schools, there are a lot ofproblems. For example, although students can master the grammar knowledge and vocabularyrequired by syllabus with a long time of learning English, they could not catch the author’smain idea with the help of the cohesion of words. They could not analyze the relationshipsamong paragraphs in order to understand the whole passage. And they do not have properreading strategies. Although there are few new words in an article, students fail to understandthe whole passage after reading and can not respond timely and accurately. When they arelearning a reading passage, they only focus on the vocabulary and grammar in the passagewith ignoring the types of the passage and cohesion and so on. So they do not have theawareness of the whole passage in reading.
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1.2 Significance of the Study
Concerning the above background, it is necessary and urgent for us to pay attention todiscourse analysis in English reading. And it has been introduced into teaching reading athome and abroad for a certain time.First, it is a basic skill for high school students to use discourse analysis. A lot of specificrequirements about written discourse analysis can be found in the description of the goals ofthe sixth level to the ninth level which are aimed at high school students. In the goal of theeighth level, especially, there are some detailed descriptions about discourse knowledge. Forexample, the students can understand different opinions and attitudes in the reading texts; thestudents can recognize the characteristics of different types of texts; the students can writesummary according to the passage; the students can write a normative type of the text andfluent sentences in their writing; the students can write short passages and reports; thestudents can master the basic knowledge of discourse and organize the information for aspecific purpose (2017). These requirements of discourse analysis are changing. They arebecoming more and more difficult than before. Generally speaking, it ，英语毕业论文，英语论文
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