Study On The Application Of Cohesion And Coherence Theory In Senior High School English Reading Teaching

As a mainstream language,English is widely used across the world.Undoubtedly,we have made great progress in English teaching.But the present situation of English teaching is not ideal.In fact,most high school students cannot read foreign journals more proficiently,which limits their English proficiency and overall ability.New English Curriculum(2017)requires students to actively participate in language practice activities based on specific topics and texts,use various learning strategies,learn the language and cultural knowledge presented in the text,analyze and understand the meaning of the topic,and use the learned language to think,express and Communication,and gradually develop the core qualities of English subjects such as language ability,cultural awareness,thinking quality and learning ability.Reading is the main test area of PISA 2018(Programme for International Student Assessment).Reading not only affects students’ subject learning and cognitive development,but also affects their ability to actively and effectively participate in political,economic and cultural life in the future.Therefore,reading is quite important in English teaching and we need to improve our reading teaching method.Based on discourse analysis theory,this thesis attempts to explore how to apply coherence and coherence theory to English reading teaching in high school from the perspective of cohesion and coherence in order to improve students’ reading ability and the effectiveness of reading teaching.The study attempts to answer the following three research questions: 1.Can the application of the Cohesion and Coherence theory improve the English reading ability of high school students? 2.How can high school teachers use the Cohesion and Coherence theory to improve students’ reading ability?3.What are the problems in reading teaching from the perspective of Cohesion and Coherence? How to solve them?In this study,120 students from two classes in a senior high school in Ganzhou were selected for the experiment,using interview,questionnaire,pre-test,and post-test as research tools.The questionnaire is to investigate the current reading situation of high school students.The pre-test and post-test are used to find out the changes of students’ English reading ability before and after the experiment.The collected data was analyzed by software SPSS 19.0.According to analyzing the collected data,the conclusions are as follows.1.The application of the Cohesion and Coherence theory can improve students’ reading ability,and its better than the traditional reading teaching method.2.The Cohesion and Coherence has positive influences on content,structure and language of students’ English reading.Teachers can use reference,substitution,ellipsis,conjunction,lexical cohesion to improve students’ reading ability.3.There are mainly three problems of reading teaching from the aspect of the Cohesion and Coherence theory: the vagueness of the theory,the overall structure of the article is not well understood and the lack of interest of the students.To solve these problems,the teachers must have a good command of the theory,introduce the background knowledge,focus on contextual explanation,and adopt a variety of teaching methods to stimulate the students’ reading interest.In a word,the Cohesion and Coherence is of great significance in improving the teaching methods of English reading in high schools.