| Nowadays, vocational college students are confronted with serious problems in reading comprehension, especially in understanding the whole text and the meanings between the lines. Thus, it is imperative to emphasize reading instruction and reading training in vocational college English teaching. In this study, the author develops the lexical cohesion-based model in English reading teaching and makes an experiment to confirm that this teaching model is important and very helpful for the reading comprehension. A model in English reading teaching is developed to assist students with this kind of ability.At present, most vocational college English teachers still follow the traditional teaching methods in reading teaching. They explain words, phrases and sentences out of context supplemented by a large number of exercises. They focus on vocabulary, grammar and other basic knowledge, but neglect the application of discourse analysis in reading teaching. Therefore, many students face serious problems in understanding the author's implied meanings though they have mastered a large number of words and grammar. Based on Halliday and Hasan's lexical cohesion theory, the author tries to apply lexical cohesion skills to the vocational college English reading teaching so that a new reading teaching model can be constructed, the teaching model of lexical cohesion-based reading to improve the student's reading ability. Under this model, students are hoped to understand the text as a whole in the reading process, understand high-frequency words at the level of discourse, grasp the author's writing intent and the deep meaning of the article better with a variety of reading skills, and then enhance their reading ability.Lexical cohesion is the main means of discourse creation, and it establishes cohesive relation through word choice, organization, and polymerization. Lexical cohesion occupies 40% of cohesive links in discourse, which is particularly important for achieving discourse coherence. It can not only promote the theme development, create a discourse framework, and organize coherent discourse, but also help the article form center sentence, edge sentence, topic sentence and conclusion sentence and form a summary and outline.An empirical study was designed and conducted in this thesis. This study took pre-test and post-test equivalent groups and used two intact classes from Jinan Institute of Railway Technology. The two classes were respectively named the control class (CC) and the experimental class (EC). In total, 110 students (55 students in each class) took part in the experiment. At the beginning, a reading test and a questionnaire survey of lexical cohesion skills were given to all the subjects. The students in EC were instructed by the lexical cohesion-based reading teaching model in English reading class for four months. Then, the other questionnaire and reading test were carried out. All the results were analyzed through SPSS.The data shows that the new teaching model of reading is effective in improving the students' reading ability. The model makes the students become aware of lexical cohesion in a passage and helps them quickly grasp the main idea and summarize the text. Teaching of lexical cohesion theory can help students analyze the hierarchy and theme of the whole article, and help them understand the author's creative intent and points of view. This kind of teaching is extremely important for clarifying the relationship between the paragraphs and between the sentences, and so it plays an important role in understanding the whole discourse and improving the student's reading ability. |
