The Effects Of Textual Cohesion Instruction On The Reading Comprehension Of EFL Students

Being defined as the most important academic language skill, reading receives the special focus in foreign language teaching. However, Chinese EFL students' reading ability is not satisfactory. Therefore, EFL reading is still waiting for further exploring. First of all, it is essential for teachers to have a clear idea about the nature of reading process. According to the psycholinguistic approach to reading and the schema theory model of reading, reading is an interactive process of communication. Either the interaction between the writer and the reader or the interaction between the reader's background knowledge and the text is made possible via the text. Therefore, it can not do without talking about study of textual features in promoting EFL learners' reading ability and efficiency.De Beaugrande and Dressier (1981) proposed seven standards by which text can be judged in the book Introduction to Text Linguistics. They are cohesion, coherence, intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality and contextuality. Only one of these standards, cohesion, can be assigned values based simply on static textual analysis with minimal immediate regard to user-text interaction. Thus, this paper focuses on the study of textual cohesion and cognitive process of reading comprehension. Based on Gestalt theory and information theory, the researcher sets up a hypothesis that instruction of textual cohesion could exert a significant influence on the EFL readers' reading comprehension. The first research question is to test this hypothesis. The second question is to investigate Chinese EFL college students' awareness of textual cohesion at present.Corresponding to the two research questions, the study was carried out in two...