| In spite of the priority given to reading among the five basic skills, Chinese college students' reading ability is not satisfactory. Success in an EFL reading course requires both teachers and students to have a clear idea about the nature of reading process. The psycholinguistic model of reading and the schema theory model of reading show that the process of efficient reading involves the interaction between writers and readers and this interaction is made possible through the text. Therefore, to study textual features is of particular importance in promoting EFL learners' reading ability and efficiency.The word "text" is used in linguistics to refer to any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that does form a unified whole(Halliday & Hasan, 1976). The seven defining characteristics of text are: cohesion, coherence, intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality and intertextuality(De Beaugrande & Dressier, 1981). Textual cohesion, one of the important linguistic features of text, has long been ignored in the teaching of EFL. This thesis is to study the relationship between this linguistic feature of text and the cognitive process of language comprehension. Based on Gestalt theory and information theory, the author sets up a hypothesis that textual cohesion could exert a strong influence on the meaning that language users derive from interacting with the text. The first research question is to test this hypothesis. The second one is that what are the Chinese college EFL teachers and students' awareness of textual cohesion if the answer to the first one is positive.This study, which was conducted with college EFL teachers and students, was carried out in two phases corresponding to the two research questions.In Phase I, 60 college students of similar language proficiency were randomly divided into two groups to take cloze testing, with one group taking every-nth format cloze, the other group taking cohesive format cloze. The data obtained in the cloze showed that the answer to the first question was positive. That is, textual cohesion did exert a strong influence on the meaning that language users derive from interactingwith the text.In Phase II, two different measures of college teachers and students' textual cohesion awareness were included: (1) use of cohesive devices in college students' writing; (2) recognition of cohesive devices in their reading. 80 compositions written by the 80 students from Xi'an International Studies University, Xi'an Institution of Technology, Chang An University and Shaanxi Normal University were collected and analyzed in terms of textual cohesion. Results showed that students were not proficient in using cohesive devices in their writing. Researches on retrospective reports and interview also showed that students lacked a strong awareness of textual cohesion. In addition, questionnaires were distributed to 20 teachers of English from the four universities mentioned above. It was found that a few teachers did not have a deep understanding of textual cohesion.The author finds that the ignorance of textual cohesion in the teaching of EFL to a large extent leads to college students' weak awareness of textual cohesion. In order to cultivate and improve students' awareness of textual cohesion, it's necessary to integrate textual cohesion into the teaching of EFL. The implications of textual cohesion for EFL teaching and learning are presented in terms of lexis, grammar, text structure and reading skills respectively.The author points out the limitations of this study and makes suggestions for future study in the last part of this thesis.
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