| Coherence is the core of textual analysis. It is influenced by quite a few factors, which can be summarized as linguistic and non-linguistic or overt and covert. In recent years, the research has been centered on the former—grammatical and lexical cohesion put forward by Halliday and Hasan, whereas the latter has not been given ample attention to. When it comes to non-linguistic or covert aspect, such factors as context, readers' cognitive, pragmatic knowledge, imagination and association are of equal importance concerning the influence on textual coherence. This paper is intended to emphasize the significance of overt and covert coherence in decoding the text, thus providing a practicable method to English reading teaching.The paper has pointed out and analyzed the present situation and problems in the teaching of English reading in China: great importance is attached to the analysis of words and sentences on the syntactic level, but little attention is given to the analysis of the text on the macro-structural level. In order to solve the problem, the author puts forward Coherence Theory which is considered as an effective way to guide students to an overall understanding of the text, thus improve their reading comprehension ability. |
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