Exploring The Teaching Approach Of EFL Reading From The Perspective Of Textual Cohesion

Reading, as the major channel to obtain linguistic knowledge, has long been paid much attention to in foreign language teaching and learning. With the deeper research on reading process, both reading theories and reading teaching methods have been improved a lot.In recent 30 years, text linguistics has developed fast. It transcends the boundary of sentence, and regards text as a whole―language in use above the sentence―as the primary object and aims at the exploration of how texts are structured to form a meaningful, unified whole. Discourse analysis is concerned with a study of language in use, involving the ways to encode a discourse and decode it. Cohesion is one of the important theories of discourse analysis and a semantic relation. It offers a new perspective for treating language and brings much enlightenment on reading teaching.Cohesion theory―the focus of this thesis and an important part in text linguistics has aroused the common interest in modern linguistics. Cohesion, as the main means of connecting sentences into a text, is a significant feature of texts. And Cohesion in English by Halliday and Hasan in 1976 is the first choice of cohesion. They systematically illustrated the basic concept of cohesion and cohesive devices in English, which are classified into two kinds: grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. Later, in their joint work Language, Context and Text (1985), Halliday and Hasan divided the cohesion system into two categories―non-structural cohesion and structural cohesion. At home, Hu Zhuanglin (1989, 1994), Zhang Delu, Liu Rushan (2003) categorized transitivity, mood, thematic structure and information structure into the cohesion system. Basing on the former studies, the author attempts to divide the cohesion system into two categories: cohesion within texts and cohesion beyond texts. The former is composed of non-structural cohesion and structural cohesion; the latter includes situational context, cultural context, cognitive context and material situation setting.The study of textual cohesion has a directive instructive meaning for language reading teaching. Reading process, as it is shown, is regarded as a kind of dialogue between the reader and the text. Readers combine the knowledge brought with themselves and the information to comprehend the text. During the process of reading, cohesive devices, to some extent, are the guides or clues for readers to make the most reasonable guess of the meaning and understand what the writer intends to express as much as possible. From this perspective of view, cohesive devices have positive impact on reading comprehension and readers'better knowledge of cohesion theory can enable them to have a better prediction about the text structure. The application of cohesion to reading helps students form a good strategy of reading based on text and deal with a text as a whole, knowing how to decode the text efficiently and logically, how to learn to read and how to enjoy reading. We may come to a conclusion that textual cohesion theory has an important role to play in EFL reading and is very helpful to improve learners'ability of using language.This thesis is a tentative probe into applying cohesion theory to the teaching of English reading comprehension. In order to justify the practical and effective value of cohesion theory, a big part of the paper contributes to the application of cohesive mechanisms to the teaching of English reading. The experimental study forcefully proves that students can improve their reading comprehension by means of textual cohesive devices. It is viable and effective to apply the discourse analysis model to EFL reading teaching. In the final part of this paper, the author puts forward several suggestions for EFL reading teaching from the perspective of textual cohesion and sets the orientations of future related studies.