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

In China, English reading teaching has long been regarded as one of the mostessential factors of the second or foreign language learning. With more and deeper studyin the process of reading, the reading teaching methods and reading theories have beenimproved a lot. So far, the reading teaching model has undergone the top-down model,bottom-up model, interactive model. They have their own advantages and disadvantages,which all have contributed a lot to the English reading teaching. However, most seniorhigh school students still have many problems and difficulties in their readingcomprehensions, especially when they are confronted with the questions concerning theimplied meaning and the understanding of the text.The cohesion theory is one of the key means for the analysis of the whole text.And cohesion, especially lexical cohesion, as an important textual feature, plays animportant role in the coherence of the whole text as well as in the readingcomprehension. Through the analysis of lexical cohesion devices appearing in the text,students can grasp the main idea, speculate the intension of writing, predict thefollowing passages and understand the macro structure of this text.In view of the importance of cohesion in understanding of the text, my paper istrying to apply the lexical cohesion based on the Halliday and Hason’s cohesion theory,into the English reading teaching in senior high schools. It combines the lexicalcohesion theory with interactive reading, which put stress not only vocabulary andgrammar, but also the overall understanding of the whole text.The research findings will be beneficial to the further development andenrichment of cohesion theory and provide some theoretical support to those senior highschool teachers who want to improve their English reading teaching. At the same time, it can also help English teachers realize the importance and necessity of cohesion in theprocess of English reading teaching.In order to study whether this teaching model can improve student’s readingability effectively or not. The author is trying to design and carry out a teaching research,which includes two questionnaires and two tests. During the process of this short timeexperiment, the students in experimental class is taught by the new teaching modelbased on the lexical cohesion and the students in the controlled class still uses theoriginal teaching method. After this experiment, the author uses SPSS16.0software tocollect and analyze the questionnaire and test data.This result shows that this English reading teaching mode is feasible to be appliedinto senior high schools. It is also helpful to raise their awareness of lexical cohesion aswell as improve their reading ability and silks. However, this paper is only a tentativeeffort, there undoubtedly have some limitations and fields got to be explored in thefuture, such as, the reading materials are not unified, the students are not representativeand the experiment time is too short.