4.6 Conclusion

Reading has been one of the most important subjects of English education at all levels of schooling in China (Hu & Baumann, 2014). During their college education, students are expected to exhibit, with increasing fullness and regularity, the literate capacity to independently comprehend and evaluate texts of varying complexities across a range of topics and disciplines. Attaining this goal requires that students have ample opportunities to work with and through texts of different types and with sufficient complexity, and at the same time be supported in these interactions. To provide the support for students, teachers need to have a sound understanding of what makes a complex text challenging and keen insights into the functionality of text complexity. It is through frequent, scaffolded encounters with richly complex texts in disciplinary contexts that students are able to learn rich language patterns, develop advanced literacy, and build content knowledge. The 5Es heuristic that embeds functional grammar analysis offers teachers one promising avenue for promoting language learning and literacy development in a contextualized fashion. The next two chapters illustrate how this development work can be done in academic and disciplinary contexts.(https://www.daowen.com)