Applications Of Lexical Cohesion Analysis In Vocabulary Teaching

Experienced teachers of English as a Second Language know very well how important vocabulary is. For many years, however, programs that prepared language teachers gave little attention to techniques for helping students learn vocabulary. Fortunately, along with the teaching need and the deep going of theoretical study, vocabulary teaching regained great concern and became one of the major points in linguistic research and language teaching. However, although many new vocabulary teaching methods emerged one after another, learning efficiency of EFL learners was not improved greatly. Most students still have fallen into rote learning.In recent years, increased attention has been given to the need to place lexis more centrally within language teaching. There are many other respects that should be taken into consideration in the teaching of words. Hence context theories were developed and applied in vocabulary teaching bridged by lexical cohesion. Enlightened by Halliday and Hasan's Cohesion in English, Michael Hoey put his emphasis on lexical cohesion in his book Patterns of Lexis in Text. In China,Liu Chendan's Text Linguistics for Teachers also mentioned in detail lexical cohesion in relation to vocabulary teaching. All of them provide us with a solid rationale.Research conducted in recent years has thrown light on lexical cohesion patterns in text, but very little experimentation has been carried out into the implications of lexical cohesion analysis for language acquisition and for vocabulary acquisition, especially data based studies. This thesis, then, deals with lexical cohesion analysis in intensive reading and reports an experimental study which was conducted to explore how lexical cohesion analysis affects EFLvocabulary instruction and the entire language teaching.This thesis consists of six parts, including the introduction and the conclusion. The introduction presents the research background of cohesion devices, especially lexical cohesion, the main issues involved in the research and the importance of lexical cohesion applying in vocabulary teaching.Chapter One mainly deals with the two important concepts which are all closely related to word teaching—cohesion and lexical cohesion. Various definitions and classifications of cohesion and lexical cohesion are presented in detail, such as the studies of Widdowson, De Beaugrande and Dressier, Renkema, Schiffrin, especially Halliday and Hasan, Michael Hoey.Chapter Two is the literature review, which discusses the research background of cohesion and lexical cohesion. The author mainly introduces the theory of cohesion, especially lexical cohesion: the overseas study of Halliday and Hasan, Michael Hoey; the domestic study of Liu Chendan.Chapter Three is a survey report of the study on the effect of the lexical cohesion analysis applying in the vocabulary teaching. In the first place, the objectives are briefly introduced and two null hypotheses to the research questions are put forward. In order to testify the above hypotheses, this study undertook a pretest/posttest non-equivalent groups design and used a convenient sample, which were two intact classes from an intact university — the computer class and the physics class as respectively the experimental group (EG) and the control group (CG). There were a total of 102 subjects participating in the experiment. However, due to the absence of some subjects for various reasons, there were only 97 students of them who entered the final data analysis.In the experiment, the independent variable was lexical cohesion analysis teaching method, with the gain scores of the subjects on the pretest and posttest as the dependent variable. For the experiment, the EG adopted the lexical cohesion analysis, while the CG still kept teaching vocabulary isolated. The same teacher taught the two groups, with the schedule and the settings of teaching for the two groups being kept nearly the same.For the data of the scores, an independent samples t-test was undertaken by means of SPSS. The independent samples t-test revealed no significant difference between the scores of the EG and the CG in vocabulary, reading and total scores of the pretest before the experiment; after the experiment, the independent samples t-test led a different result. That is to say, the hypothesis which supposed that there was no difference between the scores of the two groups by different treatments had been rejected. It proves that to incorporate vocabulary instruction into the context by lexical cohesion analysis can help the advanced learners improve their vocabulary learning ability and the entire English proficiency.Chapter Four addresses the discussion concerning the results with the evaluations of the findings intended to offer explanations to the results as well as recommendations for future research. First, in relation to the above null hypotheses, the researcher compares and analyzes the results of the experiment and evaluates the importance of the results from three respects: theory, pedagogy and practice. Second, the major findings, the implications, the limitations of the study are discussed and the recommendations for future research are put forward.The last part is the conclusion. In the conclusion, the whole thesis is summarized with the main contents, especially the applications of the lexical cohesion analysis in the vocabulary teaching.Despite the unavoidable limitations of it, the empirical way of the present study is assumed to shed some light on EFL vocabulary teaching in theory and practice. Meanwhile, it is supposed to offer some implications for the further research in the future. However, this thesis is just a superficial research of incorporating vocabulary teaching into the textual world by lexical cohesion and is open to be discussed and improved.