| It is widely recognized that reading plays an important role in improving the comprehensive language competence in English learning. Reading is regarded as the core and focus of English teaching in high schools, especially where attention is given to students'language communicative ability. However, little improvement has been made in current reading teaching in high schools though large quantities of drills and trainings are adopted for students. Therefore, it is of great urgency to research and explore the rules and methods of teaching reading to improve the reading teaching in senior high school.The achievements of both foreign and domestic linguistic study show that discourse analysis could offer a new perspective for foreign language teaching, especially the teaching of reading comprehension. Some theories, such as cohesion, schemata, and analytic modes of discourse style, have revealed their implications and applications to various linguistic practices. This article, with the title of An Applied Study of Cohesion Theory into English Reading Class in Senior High School, discusses the potential functions of cohesion theory in English reading and tries to explore effective methods to improve students'ability of English reading comprehension in the teaching practice.In this article, the author reviewed the background of discourse analysis and illustrated its main contents. Following the literature review is the statement about the teaching status of English reading in high school. The author categorized the factors hindering the development of students'reading ability into four groups, and pointed out that the problem in the reading class is due to the lack of systematic direction of teaching theories, and hence proposed a reading strategy based on discourse cohesion theory. According to the strategy, discourse cohesion theory can be used as a direction to improve English reading teaching in high school. In reading class, teachers can guide students to analyze the rules of texts with the cohesion analysis theory so as to develop their discourse awareness and improve the reading efficiency. To examine the validity of the strategy and to what extent it could promote reading teaching, the author conducted some specific experiments on teaching application with the method of contrastive analysis, exemplification and induction and so on. In his experiments, the author proposed a pedagogical method in which discourse cohesion theory is used to guide reading teaching, including lexical teaching, introduction, discourse structure analysis, cohesive devises analysis, and stress and problem-solving. These teaching procedures and methods, which are the key points of combining the discourse cohesion theory and English class teaching to improve the reading competence of high school students, should abide by the principle of step-by-step instruction and tailor-made teaching for students while confirming to the English syllabus, curriculum criteria and teaching contents. The data analysis and results achieved from the experiments confirmed the expected effect, that is, discourse cohesion theory has... |
