Effect Of Cohesive Devices On Context Construction In Middle School English Reading

Reading is a basic intellectual skill,which plays an important role in language input and accumulation.In English learning,reading is the most important part among the four basic skills of listening,speaking,reading and writing.Therefore,reading has become the focus of English examinations and accordingly reading teaching has always been regarded as the most important part of English teaching.In practical English reading teaching,many teachers simply translate,analyze and explain individual sentences and words in a text,failing to cultivate students' discourse awareness and acquisition skills of discourse information.In this traditional reading teaching method,many students can not get the ability to grasp the main idea and the coherence of a text,can not find out the context relationship,and thus can not really understand the overall meaning of a text.The students' reading ability is largely limited and can not be improved from the lack of cohesive competence and the inadequate acquisition of contextual information.Based on discourse analysis,this research focuses on the two research questions:Does the acquisition of cohesive devices help students get contextual information? Can contextual information effectively improve students' overall reading ability? This research chooses two classes from the eighth grade in a middle school for a four-month teaching experiment.In the classroom teaching,the control class adopts a traditional teaching method while the experimental class strengthens the training of cohesion devices.In addition,the experiment includes pre-test and post-test of reading comprehension,two questionnaires and an interview.Through the collection and comparison of this experimental data and also through the quantitative and qualitative analysis,this research draws the following conclusions.This research applies cohesive devices to English reading teaching in Grade 8 in a middle school.It proves that cohesive devices in English reading can help students get context construction in texts,improve their reading comprehension,boost their interest in reading,and increase their confidence in English learning.Furthermore,this research provides some new ideas for the improvement of English reading teaching in a middle school.However,because the sample used in this research comes from one grade of one middle school and the number of research samples used in this study is small,the results of the research need to be verified and tested by more and more comprehensive studies.