A Study Of Application Of Context In Language Teaching

In the process of language teaching, effective teachers do whatever they can to help students become self-reliant readers. One type of such instruction has to do with context—specifically, with using the context to comprehend a text or to decide what an unfamiliar word means.Context is an important concept in linguistics. According to contextual view from systemic functional linguistics, context can be divided into three groups: context of culture, context of situation and linguistic context. In this paper, the principle of analysis is to use linguistic context as the basis, supplemented by the other two kinds of context. Then the author analyzes cohesion and coherence in a text and their relationship, and then conducts an experiment to examine the effects of the contextual cues on inferring meanings of unfamiliar words or words with unfamiliar meanings. The experiment indicates that subjects who receive cue-adequate sentences report greater ease in inferring the meanings of the target words, than those who receive cue-inadequate sentences. Next, this paper illustrates the application of context in the teaching of EFL reading and finally combines the illustration with reading comprehension analysis in CET-4.This thesis is made up of five chapters, preceded by an introduction and ended with a conclusion. The introduction gives a brief account of the current study and development tendency at home and abroad in context and systemic-functional linguistics, and the purpose of this study. Chapter One is about systemic-functional linguistics and a key concept of it: context. It introduces first the theoretical background and research achievements in this linguistics and then the understanding and categorization of Malinowski, Firth and Halliday about context. Chapter Two mainly involves explanations of terms like text, cohesion and coherence which are closely related to context. Then from the viewpoint of pragmatics, the author explains how people create connection among utterances which seem not to be coherent. Chapter Three is about an experiment designed to examine the effects of contextual cues on inference of word meanings. In this chapter, the author discusses the purpose and hypothesis of the experiment, and then its method, data analysis and the results finally. Chapter Four illustrates the application of context in the teaching of EFL reading. First, it explains the relationship between context and reading comprehension. The rest part is about contextual analysis in teaching EFL reading comprehension...