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

As one of the important sources of language input, reading has been given much attention to by EFL learning and teaching. Researchers and teachers have done various researches and made a lot of efforts to explore effective ways to improve the learner’s reading ability at different language levels. Compared with enlightening research findings at senior high school level, research in improving junior high school students’ reading competence is rare. And the current reading proficiency of junior high school students is far from satisfactory.Against this background, this writer applies cohesion theory into junior high school reading teaching, in an attempt to improve the learner’s reading competence and arouse their interest in reading. Cohesion refers to the links that hold chunks of text together. The importance of cohesion lies in the continuity it expresses between one part of the text and another, and this continuity can provide readers with main thread of a text, affective power of a text, even enable readers to supply all the missing items in the test. According to the descriptive framework developed by Halliday and Hasan(2001), cohesion includes cohesive ties like reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, reiteration and collocation, all of which help learners to realize the linguistic form in text and understand the text better.The current study investigates two questions:1. How can cohesion theory arouse students’ interest in English reading?2. How can cohesion theory improve students’ reading comprehension ability?84 junior high students from two classes(Grade 9) in Experimental School Affiliated to Zhejiang University of Technology attended this 2-month study. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were acquired to ensure study’s validity and reliability. The pre-test suggests there is no significant difference between the experimental class(EC) and the controlled class(CC) in reading proficiency. The post-test carried out by the end of the experiment indicates that students in EC got their reading ability improved. Besides, the analyses from questionnaires before and after the experiment, as well as the interviews confirm that the cohesion theory adopted in the present study increase interest and improve the reading comprehension ability especially for the medium achievers in the class in junior high school.There are five chapters in the present thesis. Chapter One gives a brief introduction to the background, purpose and significance of the current study. The framework of the whole thesis will also be included. Chapter Two gives a review of content and the current development of the cohesion theory, and the relationship between cohesion and reading. Chapter Three deals with the methodology of the research, including research questions, instruments, participants and the detailed research procedures. The elaborative analyses and discussions of the data collected from the tests, questionnaires and interview will be presented in Chapter Four. Chapter Five is a concluding part, in which major findings, implications and limitations will be related.