The Application Of Lexical Cohesion In Teaching English Reading In Senior High Schools

English reading,as a significant way of language input,is the main content of English teaching.According to the reading ability goal proposed by the New English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School,teachers should focus on cultivating students' discourse awareness and the ability of acquiring and processing information.Although many teachers have employed various teaching methods in the process of teaching reading,and students have also spent a lot of time and efforts on reading practice,the effect is far from satisfaction.The current English reading ability of high school students is generally poor.Therefore,it is necessary to improve reading teaching in high school and the reading ability of high school students.Discourse cohesion theory is one of the means of discourse overall analysis.Discourse cohesion theory,especially the lexical cohesion,as the feature of discourse,plays a very important role in semantic coherence of a text as a whole as well as in reading comprehension.It can help students not only to reason and predict in the process of reading,but also to speculate the author's writing purpose and grasp the main idea of the passage.Based on Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theory,this research tries to apply the lexical cohesive devices to high school English reading teaching in the hope of constructing a new teaching mode— the English reading teaching mode based on lexical cohesion.This study adopts the methods of literature review,questionnaire survey,experiment and other research methods to verify the two hypotheses of experiment: the reading teaching mode based on lexical cohesion can significantly improve the reading ability of students and their basic ability of literal comprehension.The author carried out an experimental study in Xiangan No.1 Middle School in Xiamen,which was conducted from March,2015 to June,2015.During the experiment,the control class was taught by the traditional reading teaching pattern,while the experimental class was taught by the reading teaching pattern based on lexical cohesion.At the end of the semester,SPSS17.0 software was used to analyze the experimental data.The experimental results show that the reading scores of the experimental class arehigher than those of the control class.It can be summarized that the reading teaching mode based on lexical cohesion can improve the reading ability and the basic ability of literal comprehension of high school students.This study can serve as a complementary English reading teaching pattern for the traditional ones.