Application Of Discourse Cohesion To English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

Reading plays a pivotal role in English learning.In most English tests,the proportion of reading comprehension scores cannot be underestimated.However,currently senior high school students’ English reading comprehension ability is not very optimistic.What teachers pay attention to in class is generally language points,ignoring the integrity and cohesion of text,which plays a significant role in English reading comprehension.The cohesion of text is usually a problem that is not noticed;therefore,this thesis applies discourse cohesion to English reading teaching to explore its effects on English reading.The research intends to discuss the following three questions:1.What are the problems in students’ cognition of discourse cohesion in English reading?2.How does the application of discourse cohesion affect students English reading?3.What are the effects that the application of discourse cohesion has on different types of reading(multiple choice,cloze test,sentence matching)?Regarding the questions of this research,the author conducts a three months’ research,employing both qualitative and quantitative research methods.The author makes an experiment in two classes in Senior Two in No.16 Middle School.Class A is the experimental class and class B is the control class.Experimental class uses teaching method based on discourse cohesion theory while control class still employs original teaching method.In addition,this research uses questionnaire and interview as auxiliary methods to better understand students’ problems of cognition in terms ofdiscourse cohesion and the effects that the application of discourse cohesion has on English reading.The author analyzes the research data in SPSS and Excel.The results of the research show that:(1)Most of the senior high school students have ambiguities on the cognition of textual cohesion in reading.They do not know how to analyze the cohesion devices in the reading process;(2)The application of discourse cohesion can improve students’ English reading,improve reading strategies and reading confidence;(3)As for different reading types,the application of discourse cohesion has the most obvious effect on sentence matching,which can maximize this reading type’s score.