Cohesion And The Teaching Of English Reading In High School

After analyzing the present situation and problems in the teaching of English reading in high school in China, the thesis attempts to demonstrate how to apply the analysis of cohesive devices in high school English reading as well as its importance. It also tries to work out a discourse model of reading, from which students can improve their English learning skills. Reading teaching has always been an important component of English learning in China. Psycholinguistic study on reading and reading models show that the process of efficient reading involves the interaction between writers and readers and that this interaction is made possible through the text. Cohesion, as an important feature of a text, contributes a great deal to reading comprehension. Cohesion in English written by Halliday and Hasan in 1976 is the first book which systematically explores cohesion. In English. Cohesion is classified into two kinds: grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. Grammatical cohesion includes reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction. The study of discourse cohesion has a direct instructive meaning for language teaching. Cohesive devices have a positive impact on reading comprehension. They can trigger the background knowledge in the reader's memory and give clues to reading comprehension. Better knowledge of cohesion theory can enable a reader to make better predictions about text structure. So we conclude that cohesion plays an important role in English reading teaching in high school.