The Study On The Application Of Cohesion Theory To English Reading Teaching In Junior High School

Reading skill is the most important of four basic English skills for junior high school students, because reading comprehension occupies a large part in English tests. Therefore, English reading teaching is supposed to b e the most significant part in the English class. Although many people have already realized the importance of English reading and worked hard in this field, unfortunately, for the past decades the accomplishment which the English reading teaching has ach ieved can still not make us satisfied. The traditional way of teaching English reading in junior hi gh school fo cused on the cultivation and accumulation of knowledge. Reading class is once said to emphasize vocabulary, grammar and syntactic structures, of which the result is the students’ lack of the ability to appreciate and grasp the whole discourse knowledge. So reading teaching based on cohesion theory should be applied in junior high school reading teaching.This paper is a study of the application of cohesion theory to English reading teaching in junior high school. A one-term experiment is conducted on student s who are naturally chosen from two classes in Grade Eight, in Fengcheng Dixiongshan Middle School. One class is the control class and the other class is the experimental class. When having English reading classes, the former one is taught by traditional teaching method, the latter one is taught with the new method which is applying the cohesive devices to comprehending the reading texts. By analyzing the s tatistics, the present situation of English reading in junior high school is not optimistic. After one-term-training, all the data is collected by the author and analyzed by the software SPSS17.0, the e xperiment shows cohesion-theory-based reading teaching can motivate students’ interest in reading, improve students’ scores in reading than traditional method.Based on the conclusions, a reform must be carried out in the teaching of English reading in junior high school and the successful application of cohesion theory undoubtedly provides a breakth rough of the refo rm. The teachers are suggested to apply cohesion theory in teaching English reading.