The Application Of Cohesion Theory To English Reading Instruction In High School

This thesis is a tentative probe into the teaching of reading by introducing cohesion theory and discussing the practice of cohesion. Its purpose is to cultivate the students' strategy of text reading, improve their text reading comprehension and help them learn to read to meet the needs of New English Curriculum Reform and the requirements of reading comprehension in College Entrance Exam and reach the aims of reading written in English Curriculum Criterion.Discourse analysis is concerned with a study of language in use, involving the ways to encode a discourse and decode it. Cohesion, one of the important theories of discourse analysis and a semantic relation, hints how a discourse is encoded to be a coherent one and it mainly includes grammatical cohesion (reference, substitution and ellipsis), lexical cohesion (reiteration and collocation) and conjunction.Reading process is one in which a reader should follow the writer's opinion and attitude towards a text and use his/her world, language, sentence structure knowledge and so on to understand it. When reading, the students should be trained to pay attention to and analyze the cohesion in the text since cohesion suggests a means or a clue to unravel the writer's intended meaning. If so, the students can read a text skillfully, decode it efficiently, improve text reading comprehension and develop a kind of good reading habit. Meanwhile, I also wish this thesis to be a contribution to current New English Curriculum and Teaching Method Reform.