A Study On The Application Of Lexical Cohesion To Teaching Grade 9 English Reading In Junior School

In the field of English reading teaching, Lexical Cohesion, one of the Cohesion theories, has been focused in the past more than thirty years. The theory of Lexical Cohesion refers that students can improve their reading comprehension by understanding the semantic relation between the words, the phrases, the sentences and the paragraphs. Halliday & Hassan pointed lexical cohesion is a semantic relation, a property of a text which is achieved by making a connection between text constituents, and the organization of the text(which they term text) is made up of relationships among items in the text, which refers to cohesive ties. Hoey thought lexical cohesion is the single most important form of cohesive tie.Based on the lexical cohesion theory of Halliday and Hasan, this thesis attempts to apply Hoey’s patterns of lexical cohesion in text to the Grade 9 reading teaching to find out whether the lexical cohesion has an effect on the improvement of the students’ reading abilities. This thesis also attempts to find out how the lexical cohesion improves the reading abilities by the survey and talking to the students.This study undertakes a pre-test/post-test equivalent group design and uses a convenient sample, which I teach in one Junior School. The two classes were respectively regarded as the control (CC) and the experimental class(EC). Before the study, the scores in the mid-term examination were recorded. Students in the experimental class received training cohesion devices based on discourse reading teaching for half a term (two months), and then another scores in the final-exam examination were recorded, too.The scores of them were analyzed through descriptive statistics and t-test. We can find out:The results show that the new model of reading teaching in Grade 9 in Junior School was helpful to students’reading ability and reading comprehension. The scores in reading in the experimental class were two higher than the ones in the control class.The students in two classes had no obvious difference in simple details and simple synthesis, however, in complicated details and complicated synthesis,the students’ scores in the experimental class were 15percent higher than the ones’ in the control class.During the study, a questionnaire survey and a talk between the teacher and the students have been done in order to find out whether lexical cohesion had an effect on the improvement of the attitudes of the students and the teachers. We can also find79 percent students in experimental class were positive in the reading teaching. This method could raise the students’ awareness of lexical in a text and help them to deduce very effectively in some complicated things and quickly grasp the main idea and form the summary of the text.70 percent teachers thought lexical cohesion had an effect on English reading teaching by using the method of lexical cohesion, and the writer has greatly improved the reading teaching since she applied the theory into the reading teaching.In a word, this thesis intends to link the lexical cohesion theory with the teaching of Grade 9 English reading in Junior School, trying to prove that it is an efficient method to improve the students’abilities in English reading and it has had a try in the reading teaching as well, which provides a new way for developing English reading teaching and improving the students’ reading abilities.