A Study Of The Effect Of Text Connective-oriented Instruction On The Reading Proficiency Of Chinese Non-English Majors

The study of text-connectives theoretically comes under the strategy of meta-discourse (Kopple, 1985).The publication of Cohesion in English by Halliday & Hasan (1976) in London, symbolizes the founding of cohesion theory. In this book, conjunction, as a cohesive device, is defined as a way of setting up the logical relations that characterize sentences and clause complexes in the absence of the structural relationships, and therefore, it plays an essential part in creating the texture. However, college English teachers in China are likely to overlook the importance of connective devices in text organization and fail to pay adequate attention to them in classroom instruction.The present study was undertaken to explore the correlation between the text connective-oriented instruction and the reading proficiency of Chinese non-English majors. The research questions to be addressed in the study are as follows:1) Does the text connective-oriented instruction have a better effect on reading proficiency of non-English majors than the traditional teaching method?2) If so, in what way does the text connective-oriented instruction improve students'reading proficiency?The study employed two research designs: the quantitative design and the qualitative design. The former was an eight-week experiment, which was intended to examine whether the text connective-oriented instruction had a better effect on the reading proficiency of Chinese non-English majors by using the technique of consciousness raising. In the qualitative design, an interview was employed to find out how students felt about this teaching method so as to identify the underlying causes for the effect that the instruction method could have on the reading proficiency of Chinese non-English majors. The major findings of the study are as follows:1) The text connective-oriented instruction does have a better effect on the reading proficiency of Chinese non-English majors.2) An adequate knowledge of text connectives helps students to see the underlying thought patterns responsible for the composition of discourses, enables them to combine thought with language, and consequently improves their reading comprehension.3) The text connective-oriented instruction also helps to develop students'coherent thinking so that they could actively predict or infer the meaning of the text to find out the logic relationships of the text and interpret the writer's intended meaning more effectively.4) The text connective-oriented instruction could build up students'self-confidence and, as a result, could have a better effect on their learning of other skills.