Cohesion In Non-English Major Students' Intensive Reading Teaching

Reading teaching has always been an important component of the EFL teaching in China. But unfortunately, for the past decades the reading teaching has been unsatisfactory due to many factors. And the teaching approach is a very important factor. The traditional EFL reading teaching approach is mainly atomistic and form-oriented and the reading teaching only stays at the sentence level. 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 text analysis is the most important way to improve the reading comprehension. 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argues that cohesion, as an important feature of a text, contributes a great deal to reading comprehension and not out of date.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 trigger the background knowledge in the reader's memory and give cues to reading comprehension and also provide constraints in reading process.This paper confines the discussion on non-English majors' in FL reading comprehension and attempts to find whether the college students aware of the importance of text cohesion in reading comprehension. Based on the analysis to students' compositions, questionnaire and interview, it is found that most college students lack a strong awareness of textual cohesion. This study provides some implications for future FL reading teaching.