A Cognitive Study On Anaphora In College English Reading Teaching

Anaphora bears great significance to discourse understanding,where the characteristic of interactive interpretation between anaphor and its,antecedent provides essential clues for discourse comprehension,which has actually a practical significance to English reading teaching.Based on ICM,Radden and Kovecses's theory of metonymy,and Al-Sharafi's textual model of metonymy,the research explores the viability of cognitively-based anaphora resolution pedagogy.Through interpreting anaphora in the textbook and discussing the main factors that may influence anaphora resolution based on the results of the pretest,two main questions are further answered:?Whether participants can be trained through cognitively-based anaphora resolution pedagogy to improve their anaphoric processing ability;?Whether anaphoric processing ability bears positive correlation with reading comprehension ability.The present study is a mixed-methods research with the combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis.The participants,enrolled in 2015,are randomly selected from the Department of Nursing in Shanxi Medical University,with one class acting as Control Group and the other as Experimental Group.The experimental teaching was carried out during the second semester.Research findings are summarized as follows:The cognitively-based anaphora resolution pedagogy has gained better attainments.The Experimental Group did outperform the Control Group in both anaphora apprehension and reading comprehension in a statistically significant way in the post-test.The positive correlation between anaphora apprehension and reading comprehension is revealed to show their close relationship.Specifically,anaphora apprehension is an essential part in reading comprehension.Accordingly,in English reading teaching,if teachers can guide students to understand the text from the cognitive perspective,it is of great benefit to improve their anaphora processing ability and to deepen their understanding of the discourse.The research has great implications for college English reading teaching.Armed with related knowledge on discourse anaphora,teachers can predict the difficulties encountered by students in interpreting anaphora,so as to improve their reading efficiency by training their reading skills.Teachers can take advantage of cognitive theory to guide students to establish the cognitive relationship between anaphor and its antecedent,which facilitates anaphora apprehension by metonymic inference.