Lexical Cohesion And Its Implications For The Teaching Of College English Reading

Reading is one of the most important parts of college English teaching, and improving non-English major students'reading comprehension ability is one of the fundamental goals in colleges and universities in China. In the past few decades, theories and methods relating to the teaching of college English reading were improved with the help of many researches being carried on reading process both at home and abroad. Yet many students still feel frustrated in reading comprehension, especially when they are reading questions concerning the comprehension of text as a whole and the implied meaning in text. One reason may be that these students as well as some college English teachers do not pay enough attention to the roles and characteristics of text as the basic and essential factors for text analysis. Therefore, to study text analysis is one of the most important ways to improve the reading comprehension. Cohesion theories are an important part in text linguistics. Cohesion itself is part of the text-forming component in the linguistic system, which is categorized into two types: grammatical and lexical. Lexical cohesion falls into the domain in which the continuity of text is established by a selection of words which forms a chain through the text. Halliday and Hasan argue that lexical cohesion is the highest level of cohesion and a difficult means to handle; Hoey claims that it is the most single important form of cohesive tie and makes up about forty percent of the total. Based on the studies of some foreign linguists and Chinese scholars, it is held in this thesis that lexical cohesion, as an important feature of text, contributes a great deal to reading comprehension, in which it can trigger the background knowledge in readers'memory and give them cues to reading comprehension as well as provide constraints in the reading process. After a thorough analysis of lexical cohesion in forms, functions and the ways how they relate one sentence to one another in text, the author puts forward some practical and instructive suggestions on the teaching of college English reading, hoping this thesis will help to facilitate non-English major students'cohesive awareness and improve their reading ability.