A Study On The Application Of Cohesion And Coherence Theory To English Reading Teaching Of "Five Out Of Seven Choices" In Senior High School

Chongqing have adopted the national college entrance examination English paper volume Ⅱ since 2016.The Five-out-of-Seven Choices type of English reading comprehension question in the test paper volume two is a new one for students in Chongqing.This type of reading test mainly examines students’ understanding of the whole text from context and requires students to complete the text with five sentences from seven choices to ensure the coherence and logic of the text.It requires students not only to have a good command of language skills,but also to have a strong logical thinking ability,which is undoubtedly a big problem for students.However,there are relatively few studies on the Five-out-of-Seven Choices type of reading question.As a result,English teachers on the front cannot be provided relevant theory knowledge to support teaching practice,and students are lack of effective method to help solve the new type reading question.So it is vital to handle the difficulties in the Five-out-of-Seven Choices type of reading question.Meanwhile,The English Curriculum Standards for Common Senior High School(2017 edition)put forward the following requirements about students’ language ability,“extracting thematic meaning of the text,analyzing the structure,stylistic features and coherence of the text.…… students should know what methods had been applied into a text in order to express the meaning appropriately.” Above information requirement is in lines with the exam syllabus,both which lead a direction of cultivating students’ reading comprehension ability.That is,students not only need to focus on the theme of texts,but also to analyze the structure of a text,stylistic feature,coherence and cohesive devices of a text.That provides a possibility of applying the cohesion and coherence theory into reading teaching.This study focus on discourse integrity,guided by Halliday and Hasan’s Cohesion and Coherence Theory,to analyze whether the theory is helpful for answering the five out of seven choices type of reading question in senior high school.The following questions are expected to be explored: 1.Cohesion and Coherence Theory applied into analyzing the reading test Five-out-of-Seven Choices,dose it improve students’ reading skills?2.Can it improve student’s question-solving accuracy after Cohesion and Coherence Theory applied into analyzing the item Five-out-of-Seven Choices?The study selected the grade 1 of Qijiang senior high school in Chongqing as the research object.There are 109 students in two parallel classes,class14 as experimental classes with fifty-four students,and class16 as control class with fifty-five students.Both of the two classes share with the same English teacher.The teaching experiment lasted 12 weeks.There is one class in a week planed both the two classes in dealing with the five-out-of-seven type of reading test besides the normal English teaching.Cohesion and Coherence Theory is applied into the experimental class,while the conventional teaching method is applied in control class.Finally,the software SPSS23.0 is used to analyze the relevant data.Questionnaire 1 and questionnaire 2 are designed to collect information of students’ commands on reading skills,and their attitudes.The comparative analysis is made in the end and the research results are as follows:The Cohesion and Coherence Theory,applied into helping analyze and answer the reading test Five-out-of-Seven Choices in experimental class,do have effects on improving the efficiency on the reading comprehension question solving,which is proved by higher correct rate within the same time in finishing the Five-out-of-Seven Choices type of reading question.Students in experimental class who guided by teacher to read and analyze the reading material based on the relevant knowledge of Cohesion and Coherence Theory get familiar with the questions they faced and catch an appropriate method in dealing with it gradually during the whole teaching procedure.Through the data analysis of the same questionnaires filled by 109 students before and after the experiment,it could be known that most of the student are seldom rely on reading skills while they do the reading comprehension,but after the whole teaching experimental students have a good command of reading skills and can wisely use it help solve question.What’ more,students show active attitudes on the Five-out-of-Seven type of reading question in the end.