Cohesion,Texture,Schema And Reading

The teaching of reading has long been viewed as one of the most important parts in EFL (English as a Foreign Language ) teaching. The real purpose of the teaching of EFL reading is to develop learners?reading ability and discourse competence. In order to achieve this purpose I adopt a discoursal approach in the teaching of English, Learn It Better (Book Il-Ill) to English majors. This approach is an application of discourse analysis to the teaching of reading. The discoursal approach mainly covers cohesion theory, texture theory and schema theory. In China most teachers usually adopt the traditional model based on Grammar- Translation (GT) approach. As a result of that, students?discourse competence is much lower compared with their grammatical competence. Thus, in order to increase students?discourse competence and improve their reading ability, it is advisable for teachers to teach EFL reading at discoursal level梩o employ a discoursal approach. As far as the application of cohesion theory, texture theory and schema theory are concerned, we mainly discuss their importance in reading and explore how to improve students?reading ability and discourse competence by exploiting them. This M.A. thesis is composed of six chapters. Chapter One is an introduction to the thesis. It briefly introduces the current teaching of reading in China and the relationship between reading and discourse analysis. Chapter Two illustrates cohesion theory, texture theory and schema theory. In the illustration of cohesion, we briefly talk about the five cohesive ties: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. As to texture, we put forward three kinds of text patterns: general-specific pattern, patching pattern and problem-solution pattern. For schema, we have a brief overview of schema theory. Chapter Three talks about the role of cohesion in reading and its application in the ?46 Cohesion, Texture, Schema and Reading teaching of reading. It mainly concerns how teachers should help students to strengthen their awareness of cohesive ties, and increase their reading ability and discourse competence by employing the five cohesive ties. Chapter Four is concerned with the role of texture theory in reading and its application in the teaching of reading. Through the discussion, we can conclude that through guiding students to recognize the text pattern of different types of text, teachers can help students improve their reading ability. Chapter Five deals with schema and reading, including the importance of schema in reading, how to help students construct their schemata appropriate for the material they are going to read, and schemata and reading material selection. They all contribute to improving students?reading ability and discourse competence. Chapters Three, Four and Five are the focus of this paper. They present a comparatively exhaustive study of the application of the discoursal approach by employing the examples taken from the texts in English, Learn It Better, Books 11-111 Chapter Six is the conclusion of this paper. It once more emphasizes the necessity of the discoursal approach to the teaching of reading to improve students?reading ability and discourse competence. And at the end of this paper, we give four suggestions on how to employ the discoursal approach to the teaching of reading. After all, this thesis is just a preliminary study. Further explorations need to be done in the future.