Application Of Cohesion Theory In Junior Middle School Reading Teaching

It is widely known that reading is very important for almost all the people, especially for the students. It is by far the most important of the four skills. Teaching English reading is currently the focus of much concern. However, a great deal of research has been done in this aspect. We are still aware that many students, after learning English for years, often end in failure about their comprehension when asked to read a passage. As teachers, we should constantly study more theories about teaching and put it into practices for our references in order to make our teaching more effective.During the past decades, reading theories and practices had seen dramatic improvements because of our growing understanding and accepting of the developments in linguistics, psycholinguistics and language teaching. And discourse analysis teaching approach is one of the most important approaches. It focuses on the discourse, whose information and regular patterns are keys to reading comprehension. 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 theoretical background, relevant terms and the two types of cohesion theory. It also explores how to apply grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion to Junior Middle School reading teaching and then describes the 5-month experiment that has been conducted to determine the effects of applying cohesion theory to Junior Middle School reading teaching. This thesis also discusses the results and findings of the experiment and concludes the advantages of applying cohesion theory to Junior Middle School reading teaching, the teaching effects and the limitations of the present study. This study aims at finding an effective teaching approach to Junior Middle School reading teaching by probing into the feasibility and effects of applying cohesion theory to Junior Middle School reading teaching. It reaches the conclusion that cohesion theory can be used to guide Junior Middle School reading teaching in that it can help improve students' reading ability effectively, especially the ability to understand the text as a whole.