The Application Of Cohesion Theory To Teaching English Reading In Senior Middle School

The teaching of reading has long been viewed as one of the most important parts of ESL. The real purpose of the teaching of ESL reading is to develop learners' reading ability and text competence in order to increase students' text competence and improve their reading ability. Until now, the reading teaching model has gone through from the traditional model, i.e. bottom-up model, to the interactive reading model, to the schema-reading model, and to the discourse-based reading model.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, is realized partly through grammar and partly through vocabulary and is therefore identified as the following two categories: grammatical cohesion which includes reference, ellipsis, substitution and conjunction; and lexical cohesion which 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. 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.This thesis is a tentative probe into applying cohesion theory to the teaching of English reading comprehension. Its purpose is to examine whether training senior students with the teaching model based on cohesion theory in English class is helpful to improve students' reading ability. Based on the discourse analysis and cohesion theory, the present study adopts both qualitative and quantitative research methods in a one-term long teaching experiment. The subjects of the study are 102 Chinese EFL students in classl9 & class 20 Grade One. The students in classl9 & class 20 Grade One are chosen randomly to serve as the Experimental Class (class 19), and the Control Class (class 20). Through a term's study, the EC students received training of cohesion-focused method, while the CC students were taught by the traditional method of reading. At the end of the term, by analyzing the data of two questionnaires and the scores of pre-test and post-test, the author drew the conclusion that the application of cohesion theory is feasible in practical reading teaching, and the students who receive training in cohesion theory performed better in reading than those students without treatment.The thesis consists of six parts. Chapter One is the introduction to the thesis, which briefly discusses the significance and importance of reading comprehension, current situation, the problems existing in English reading teaching and reasons why we need to apply cohesion theory to improve reading teaching in senior middle school. It also introduces the aims of reading written in English Curriculum Criterion and the requirements of reading comprehension in College Entrance Exam. Chapter Two is a literature review that briefly introduces the research projects home and abroad, major reading theories and research into cohesion theories. Chapter Three mainly discusses the theories contributing to the cohesion-based teaching model of reading, that is discourse analysis and Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theory. Chapter Four describes the methodology, including the hypotheses, the experimental and teaching procedures. Chapter Five presents the data collection and analysis of the results. Chapter Six ends the study with the conclusion that the model of teaching reading is beneficial for students' understanding of a text as a whole and helpful to students' reading ability. In addition, the limitations of the present research and some tentative suggestions for further research were put forward.