An Application Of Lexical Cohesion To Vocabulary Teaching In Senior Middle School

From the long-term high school English teaching practice, the author comes to find that there exist the disadvantages in traditional (sentence-based, most of the currently-used) vocabulary instruction at high school English level: plenty of time having been consumed, much mechanical memorizing of words conducted, but less ability of flexible word use in certain context gained. Therefore, after a careful study of the theory, the author proposes a new viewpoint of applying the lexical cohesion theory in Text Linguistics into the vocabulary instruction in high school in order to get a positive result. This is certainly the backbone of this thesis. After the significance and purpose of the applification of lexical cohesion is revealed, and a review over foreign and domestic relevant researches on text linguistics and its applications is done, a new point of view about vocabulary instruction based on lexical cohesion is proposed. Next the author tries to establish the present thesis on Halliday and Hasan's relevant theory and briefly introduces the major contents of the theory: Lexical Cohesion. The methodology of the present research consists of a theoretical method and an empirical method. That is: firstly, the author makes plentiful connections between the theory and students' currently-used textbooks by looking into a lot of examples of sentences, paragraphs and texts so that they can have a good understanding of the functions of the lexical cohesion devices; secondly, the author conducts an empirical research, in which he puts forward some practical strategies which carry lexical cohesion in different phases of vocabulary acquisition, and in which the author sets two groups: EG and CG. These two groups are actually the two classes at high school level. In this empirical experiment, the author exploits the basic, necessary procedure in order to get a reliable data. After a lot of comparasions, discussions and analysis, the author draws an affirmative conclusion, admits the limitations of the present research and sincerely longs for corrections, instructions and further empirical experiments.