Lexical Cohesion Theory And Its Application To Middle School English Reading Instruction

Being defined as one of the most important language skills, reading has always occupied a prominent position in middle school English teaching and learning. With the implementation of the New Curriculum Standard of Senior English for Chinese Students, more attention has been paid to the cultivation of students'communicative competence. English teachers start putting more emphasis on the understanding of the whole text in their English reading teaching. Senior English books provide rich linguistic materials for teachers to use discourse analysis in their teaching. It can make students more active and interested in English learning and help teachers to gradually form the student-centered teaching awareness in their reading classes.However, compared with the high requirements for middle school students, their English reading competence is unsatisfactory. One of the reasons is that traditional English teaching mainly focuses on linguistic competence, such as vocabulary, sentence and grammar. As a result, students have a larger amount of vocabulary and can make correct sentences, but their reading ability at the textual level is not developed effectively.The author of this thesis proposes that cohesion, especially lexical cohesion, contributes a lot to reading ability. It can inspire the readers'background knowledge, give them cues of reading and provide constraints in the reading process. Lexical cohesion should be given enough attention during the process of English teaching, as a very important factor in discourse interpretation. However, through the questionnaire investigation about lexical cohesive awareness of students, the author find that most of students nearly haven't any awareness of the cohesion in the discourse, and they haven't ability to recognize and use these cohesive devices to understand and interpret a coherent text efficiently, especially lexical cohesion. Moreover, another important reason which causes the situation is that some English teachers do not combine these cohesive theories with practical reading in teaching. Therefore, for the sake of improving students'reading ability at the text level, it is necessary to put relevant cohesive theories into practical use and strengthen students'cohesive awareness in the process of teaching.Based on the theories of lexical cohesion and reading, the author puts up the proposal of applying lexical cohesion methods into senior English reading teaching. Research methods used in this thesis are analysis, citing examples, questionnaire and experiment. The thesis outlines first of all the theories of reading and lexical cohesion, and then discusses from the perspective of teaching practice why we need to introduce lexical cohesion into Senior English text teaching. From the teaching practice, the author shows us the general pattern and processes of reading teaching and discusses how we analyze the texts in the actual Senior English reading teaching. The aspects that we should cover are: background knowledge of the text, macrostructure and microstructure. In order to verify the feasibility of the study, an experiment is designed which includes two questionnaires and two test papers. The subjects of the experiment were 100 students who were studying in two classes of Grade Two at Wutai Middle School. Their final examinational results were nearly equal. The two classes were chosen randomly to serve as the experimental class (EC), and the other as the control class (CC). The specific research questions are listed below:1. Does the lexical cohesion theory improve senior middle school students'reading ability effectively?2. If this is true, how can teachers help their students to finish reading using the lexical cohesion theory?At the beginning of the experiment, a reading test and a questionnaire survey of reading strategy and lexical cohesion devices were given to the subject, in order to check whether they knew of the lexical cohesion and whether they were the same level in English reading. During this period of time, in the experimental class both the lexical cohesion pattern and the traditional teaching method were applied. In the control class only the traditional teaching method was used. After four months, they completed a post-questionnaire and they took a post-test. The results were different from the beginning. At the same time, some data were collected and analyzed with SPSS 17.0. The analysis showed that the results after experiment were different from the beginning, and indicated that the application of lexical cohesion contributed a lot to the improvement of the students'English reading in the middle school. The main findings of the thesis are as follows:1)It is obvious that the new teaching method can effectively improve the reading ability of the senior middle school students.2)The lexical cohesion-based reading model stresses that students should understand a text not only from the grammar and meaning at the micro but also at the macro level in a whole, which can teach students how to infer and summarize.3)The results of the empirical research prove that the lexical cohesion-based reading model can be applied to reading teaching, and it can also be a necessary supplement to the traditional teaching method.