An Experimental Study On Cohesive Devices Applied To English Reading In High School

Up to now, there is an urgent problem which should be solved, the problem is how to enhance students'reading ability in high school. Therefore, with this issue in this study, the author attempts to apply cohesive devices in cohesion theory which is advanced by Halliday and Hasan to instruct English reading in high school, at the same time, it is proved that this instruction method based on cohesive devices whether can improve the high school students'reading comprehension ability.In a semester, the author chooses at random 120 Senior One students in two natural classes and 6 English teachers as subjects, they are all from No. 5 Middle School in Loudi. The reading tests and education practice are done on students and interview is conducted on English teachers. This experiment includes three steps: The first step, before implementation of reading tests and education practice, the author simultaneously carries out English reading tests to the students in the two classes, and interviews these English teachers, and then, through analyzing with SPSS 13.0 software, it is found that there is no significant difference between the students in the two classes, and the high school English teachers have weak textual cohesion awareness in reading teaching process and can not efficiently utilize cohesive devices to teach English reading. The second step, the two natural classes are divided into experimental class and control class. In approximate half and four months, the experimental class is instructed by new method (applying cohesive devices: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion to instruct English reading), and the control class is also instructed by traditional method. The third step, after experimental reading teaching, the author simultaneously carries out English reading test to the students in the two classes again, and also analyzes the data with SPSS 13.0 software, it is found that the mean score of experimental class is higher than that of control class.The experiment shows that this new method, based on cohesive devices to instruct high school English reading, can efficiently improve high school students' reading ability. So, the author believes that this instruction method based on cohesive devices should be paid more attention to in high school English reading teaching. At last, the author attempts to put forward some suggestions for English reading teaching and gives some recommendations to further research.