The Application Of Cohesion Theory In SVS English Reading Teaching

One of the aims of English teaching in secondary vocational schools(SVS) in China is "to give more emphasis to developing students' reading ability and enabling them to acquire the capability of teaching themselves, thus laying a solid foundation for their learning and using English." However, the traditional English teaching aims at cultivation and accumulation of knowledge. Reading Class was once called "Vocabulary Class". Its teaching centers on vocabulary and grammar, totally neglecting the development of the students' ability to understand the text as a whole. But as we know while reading, what readers face directly is discourse, whose information and regular patterns are keys to reading comprehension. Thus, there is a need to establish discourse analysis in reading instruction.Cohesion, one of the most significant theories of discourse analysis, is achieved partly through grammar and partly through vocabulary. Grammatical cohesion includes reference, ellipsis, substitution and conjunction, and lexical cohesion refers to reiteration and collocation. Cohesion gives us a motivation and a means to unravel the structure and textuality of texts and uncover the writer's intended meaning efficiently.This thesis makes a detailed introduction of the theoretial background, relevant terms and the two types of cohesion theory. It also explores how to apply grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion to SVS reading teaching and thendescribes the 8-month experiment that has been conducted to determine the effects of applying cohesion theory to SVS reading teaching. This thesis also discusses the results and findings of the experiment and concludes the advantages of applying cohesion theory to SVS reading teaching, the teaching effects and the limitations of the present study. This study aims at finding an effective teaching approach to SVS reading teaching by probing into the feasibility and effects of applying cohesion theory to SVS reading teaching. It reaches the conclusion that cohesion theory can be used to guide SVS reading teaching in that it can help improve students' reading ability effectively, especially the ability to understand the text as a whole.