Cohesion And The Teaching Of Advanced EFL Reading

Reading is an interactive process between background knowledge and the text elements. Both the reader and the text are essential factors in reading comprehension. The author argues that cohesion, as an important feature of a text, contributes a great deal to. reading comprehension and not out of date. Cohesion can trigget< the background knowledge in the readef s memory and give cues to reading comprehension and also provide constraints in reading process. Cohesive devices supply with tangible techniques to the teaching of reading, which can not be achieved from any other reading theories. Cohesive devices are signals for reading comprehension and help readers in many aspects such as: understanding the meaning, solving reading problems, making inference, increasing reading speed and realizing the structure of the text. The efficient readers are always the ones who make good use of cohesive devices as reading strategies. In teaching cohesion, the focus should lie on the use of cohesion, not on the knowledge of cohesion. There is no need to burden students with the troublesome terminology for learning cohesion terms in linguistics. Teachers should help students to find some strategies to realize the cohesive devices so that the students can easily associate with their background knowledge. The strategy of drawing charts of cohesive devices can help students realize the structure and the main idea of the text and also help solve reading problems. The strategy of substitution of cohesive devices helps realize the writing style and the attitude of the writer. The strategy of correcting mistakes in class leaves deep impression on students about the correct use of cohesion. Reading is a complicated cognitive process. Cohesive devices in the text are both basic triggers and constraints for this cognitive process. The reader factor and the text factor are just like two sides of one coin, neither can be ignored.