A Study On Textual Cohesion And Its Enlightenment On College English Reading Teaching

Reading, as the major channel for students to get linguistic knowledge, has long been paid much attention to in foreign language teaching and learning. With the deeper research on reading process, both reading theories and reading teaching methods have been improved a lot. Nowadays, in reading classes besides vocabulary and syntax, readers and their background knowledge are usually taken into consideration. However, most college students still have a lot of complaints and problems in reading comprehension, especially when they are confronted with questions concerning the understanding of the whole text and the implied meaning. According to the author's observation, in reading and reading teaching most college students as well as college English teachers ignore the role of text as the basic but essential factor for text interpretation.In recent 30 years, text linguistics has developed fast. It transcends the boundary of sentence, and regards text as a whole-language in use above the sentence-as the primary object and aims at the exploration of how texts are structured to form a meaningful, unified whole. It offers a new perspective for looking at language and brings much enlightenment on reading teaching.Cohesion theory—the focus of this thesis, is an important part in text linguistics. Cohesion as the main means of connecting sentences into a text is a significant feature of texts. It contributes a great deal to semantic coherence of texts and to reading comprehension. Cohesive devices such as reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion existing within the text are important reading cues in the text, acting as triggers to activate the reader's mind and also to constrain the inference from going beyond. They also can be signposts to give cues to reading comprehension to help the reader in many aspects.Cohesion, as a very important factor in text interpretation, should be given enough attention in reading teaching practice. But the result of a research designed by the author toexamine the cohesive awareness of both college students and English teachers shows that college students' cohesive awareness is not strong. In reading most of them cannot recognize and take advantage of cohesive devices to help construct and understand a coherent text. Meanwhile, through the interview with some college English teachers the author finds that most of them do not have a clear understanding of cohesion, not to mention cultivate students' awareness of textual cohesion in teaching. This is the major reason leading to students' weak awareness of textual cohesion.On the basis of the thorough analysis of cohesion theory and the findings derived from the research on college students' reading in English and English reading teaching, the author puts forward some practical suggestions to apply cohesion theory to ESL reading teaching so as to help improve ESL readers' cohesive awareness and reading ability.