An Applied Study Of Cohesion Theory In Senior High School English Reading Teaching

China's current situation of English reading teaching is that too much attention has been given to grammatical teaching and lexical teaching. As a result, students who were taught by this kind of reading teaching mode, their discourse analysis competence is weak; it is hard for them to grasp the macro meaning of texts and their reading ability is lower. How to change the current situation? The author thinks that using cohesion theory to guide reading teaching is a practical way and can improve students'reading ability.The paper aims to explore cohesion theory and its application in English reading teaching in senior high school. Cohesion, as one of typical theories of discourse analysis, contributes a lot to reading comprehension. Cohesion can be divided into explicit cohesion and implicit cohesion. Explicit cohesion is made up of grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. Implicit cohesion refers to the deep, semantic links of a text; it can link the text through context, reasoning and the common knowledge of both sides in communication. The author found that cohesion theory has great guiding significance for reading teaching. Mastering the cohesive devices, readers can guess the meanings of new words, speculate the intension of writing, grip the main idea, predict the following passage and understand the macro structure of the article.The author first investigates China's current situation of English reading teaching in senior high school from teachers and students'aspects, finding that there are lots of problems in reading teaching. In order to solve the problems that exist in current reading teaching, the author tries to apply cohesion theory to English reading teaching in senior high school. Therefore, in chapter4, the author puts forward the specific application of cohesion theory in reading teaching in senior high school; then the author carries out a specific teaching experiment in order to see whether cohesion theory can improve students'reading ability or not. The author makes a reading test in two classes before the experiment and finds the reading ability of the two classes is equal. During the process of the experiment, the author adopts cohesion theory to guide reading teaching in the experimental class, but still uses the traditional teaching method in the control class, namely concentrating on grammatical teaching and lexical teaching. After the experiment the author makes another reading test and analyzes the two test data, finding that using cohesion theory to guide English reading teaching can improve students'reading ability. Finally, the author puts forward the limitations of the experiment and suggestions for further study.