An Application Of Lexical Cohesion Model To Teaching Of Reading In English Major Students

Reading teaching plays a crucial role in improving students'comprehensive abilities in English teaching. Promoting the students'reading skill, therefore, is the most urgent problem to be solved. Nevertheless, while teaching reading comprehension, most teachers ignored the function of lexical cohesion, rather, they focused their attention chiefly on meaning and syntactic structures.The present study is to explore the influences which lexical cohesion theory was applying in the reading teaching of English major students. Its meaning lies in encouraging students to using the theory, which can facilitate the students'understanding of texts and broaden the students'horizon. On the other hand, it tries to provide the teachers some valuable suggestions in their reading comprehension teaching from a macro perspective. In this respect, three research questions are included: Firstly, Will the teaching model based on lexical cohesion improve the reading comprehension ability of the English major students? Secondly, if it does, what will the influence to three different level groups be? Thirdly, which question type will get the most benefits from the teaching model of lexical cohesion? The subjects of the present students are 115 freshmen of English major in Gansu Political Science and Law Institute. The instruments of the study include questionnaires, pre-text, post-text and SPSS. In order to prove the applicability of the theory, experiments are designed which lasted for one semester. The result of the experiment shows that applying Hoey's theory of lexical cohesion in reading teaching is of great help in improving the English major students'reading ability.Based on Hoey's theory of lexical cohesion, the thesis introduces lexical cohesion into English reading teaching. According to this theory, reading comprehension should be carried out at the level of both micro and macro structure and the readers should understand the text as a whole, and the meaning of high-frequency words is to be highlighted at the text level. The theory stresses that the relationship between cohesive links are hierarchical and non-linier and the bonds of lexical repetition can be used to distinguish different categories of sentences. Thus, this model is only suitable of non-narrative articles.The present thesis consists of 6 chapters. Chapter 1 is the introduction, in which the background of the study as well as the aim and significance this study is discussed. Chapter 2 is literature review that briefly introduces the research projects home and abroad. Chapter 3 mainly discusses the relevant information about the lexical cohesion theory of Michael Hoey. Chapter 4 elaborates the designing, methods, the specific teaching steps. Chapter 5 deals mainly data analysis, and the result of the study is drawn in this part. Chapter 6 ends the study with the conclusion that the reading teaching model guided by this theory is helpful to promote the students'reading comprehension. It can raise the awareness of the students to understand the lexical meaning in the text framework, thus cultivating the students'ability of writing the summary precisely and quickly; and it is also helpful to promoting students'overall reading comprehension. In addition, the limitations of the present research and some tentative suggestions for future research are put forward. It points out that the key of the applying the model is to activate the students'background knowledge and make it to be related to textual knowledge, thus they can understand the text as a whole.