A Study Of Reading Comprehension Question In NMET From The Perspective Of Text Analysis

Since Halliday proposed the Cohesion Theory, text analysis has been one of themainstream linguistic methods. Over the past several decades, there have beenconsiderable researchers analyzing listening, speaking, reading and writing with textanalysis. Among those researches, reading takes up the majority, which providessufficient theoretical bases for English reading teaching. In this thesis, the author makesa study on reading comprehension of NMET in Sichuan Province based on CohesionTheory and Textual Pattern Theory, which involves the latest five years’ NMET testingpapers. Both quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis will be adopted to study howto get the information in texts to answer the four main types of questions: detailquestion, inference question, word-guessing question and main-idea question.By analyzing the latest five years’reading comprehension of NMET in Sichuan, itis found that detail question and main-idea question are the mainly tested types, andsome other forms are added, such as word-guessing and inference; grammaticalcohesive devices and lexical cohesive devices are both important in detail, word-guessing and inference questions; main-idea question appears in narration andexposition frequently and the topics about narrative and advertisement take up themajority. Based on the above findings, some pedagogical implications are put forward: tounderstand the requirements of the New Curriculum Standard and use them practicallyin English teaching; to put more emphasis on cohesive devices; to pay more attention tothe teaching of background information; to add some reading materials appropriatelyand then being familiar with the structures of different genres; to increase theaccumulation of students’ vocabulary; to encourage students themselves to pay moreattention to some hot issues.