The Application Of Lexical Cohesion In Teaching English Reading In Senior High Schools

With the steady progress in social development and the new curriculum reform of basiceducation, the ability to obtain information in English becomes increasingly important.Reading is one of the ways to develop this ability. Being defined as one of the most importantlanguage skills, reading has been paid more attention to English teaching and learning. Socultivating and improving the students’reading ability has become one of the main objectivesand requirements of the English teaching. With more researches on the reading process,reading teaching methods have been improved. So far, the teaching model of reading hasundergone the top-down model, the bottom-up model and the interactive model. Absorbingforeign teaching theory and taking Chinese context into consideration, domestic and foreignlinguists attempt to find a teaching method of English reading which is more suitable forChinese students.Lexical cohesion, as a textual feature, plays an important role in reading comprehensionand semantic coherence of the whole text. Lexical cohesion can provide some clues to readingand help the students to predict in the reading process. At the same time, they can be used asreading comprehension signs to help the reader understand the discourse. Therefore, lexicalcohesion should be given adequate attention in the teaching of reading as an important factorin the discourse.The traditional high school English reading model has its shortcomings. Teachers oftenpay attention to words, grammar and sentence structure in the process of teaching. So theteaching effectiveness is not very satisfactory. Students lacks of overall understanding of thediscourse in reading. The majority of students’reading is inefficient, slow and only stays onthe surface to understand the language. Exploring the mode of teaching of reading has becomean inevitable requirement in order to effectively improve the students’reading ability, the newcurriculum reform and the new principles of college entrance examination put forward thenew requirements of the students’comprehensive language competence, which draws moreattention on discourse teaching. It is highly necessary to apply lexical cohesion theory to thehigh school English reading teaching and try to make it an effective complement to traditional English teaching. According to the current status of reading and the requirements of newcurriculum, we should pay attention to the whole text in the teaching of reading.Based on the Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion theory, this thesis attempts to apply lexicalcohesion to the English reading teaching in the high school and to build a new teaching model,that is, the reading model based on lexical cohesion. Based on the lexical cohesion theory andpractice survey, the writer proposes the reading teaching model of“whole-part-whole”anddiscusses the application process of it in high school English teaching combined with specificlesson. This model builds on the theory of lexical cohesion and interactive reading,emphasizing not only vocabulary and grammar at the micro level but also the overallunderstanding and the discourse structure at the macro level.In order to verify that the teaching model based on lexical cohesion theory can improvesenior high school students’reading ability effectively, the author designed and conducted athree-month teaching experiment. During the experiment, the control class was taught by thetraditional reading teaching method, while in the experimental class the“whole-part-whole”reading teaching method based on lexical cohesion was used. Finally, SPSS software was usedto analyze pretext data and posttest data, and the results show that the reading model based onlexical cohesion is feasible in the actual teaching and can effectively improve students’English reading ability. And it can be used as a supplement of the traditional reading teachingmethods.