Teaching Reading In Senior High Schools With Cohesion And Coherence

With the development of global economy, the competence of using language hasbecome one of the most important standards to evaluate a person. For English learners,learning the four basics English skills--listening, speaking, reading and writing is veryimportant and reading is the key factor in them. When reading taught in class in senior highschool, however, teachers pay too much attention to the grammatical structure andvocabulary, neglecting the integrity of the whole structure.Cohesion and coherence are crucial factors in a text. Textual coherence can be dividedinto coherence within text and coherence beyond text. Coherence within text can beembodied through cohesion. According to Halliday and Hasan, cohesion can be classifiedinto structural cohesion and non-structural cohesion. The structural cohesion can bedivided into transitivity structure, thematic structure, information structure and moodstructure. The non-structure cohesion can be divided into grammatical cohesion and lexicalcohesion. Many reading strategies are related with cohesion and coherence theory.Cohesion and coherence is one of the most important features of a text. Textualcoherence can be divided into coherence within text and coherence beyond text. Coherencewithin text can be embodied through cohesion. According to Halliday and Hasan, cohesioncan be classified into structural cohesion and non-structural cohesion. The structuralcohesion can be divided into transitivity structure, thematic structure, information structureand mood structure. The non-structure cohesion can be divided into grammatical cohesionand lexical cohesion. Many reading strategies are related with cohesion and coherencetheory. This thesis mainly studies the positive impact of the coherence within the text thatis structural cohesion and non-structural cohesion on the whole understanding of text. Theauthor aims to explore answers to these experimental questions:1. What effect do cohesion and coherence have on improving students’ readingability?2. How will the teaching method based on cohesion and coherence skill enrich thestudents’ reading strategies？The author chooses the students from two classes from the Senior High schoolattached to Bohai University in Jinzhou as the experimental subjects. The reading ability ofstudents of the two classes is at the same level. The author makes a contrast experimentwhich lasts four months. In teaching process, the experimental class is taught with theteaching method based on cohesion and coherence skill while the students in the controlclass are taught with combined teaching methods. The students of the two classes are both required to do the questionnaire and the tests before and after the teaching experiment.Then the author makes an interview with20students from the experimental class to learnabout whether they like the new teaching model and how much they have mastered aboutthe new reading method.The results of the experimental data analysis show that using cohesion and coherenceskill consciously in reading is helpful to comprehend the text as a whole. And in Englishreading teaching，training students’ reading skills with cohesion and coherence consciouslycan improve students’ reading ability and enhance students’ reading strategies.