The Application Of Cohesion Theory To Senior English Text Teaching

As we all know, text teaching keeps a large proportion in high school English classroom teaching. For a long time, how to perform effective text teaching has drawn the concern for most senior English teachers. However, in traditional English text teaching, teachers tend to put too much emphasis on grammatical teaching and lexical teaching, and the inner structure of the text, like the relationship between the title and the paragraphs, sentences and words are neglected, which weakened students'discourse analysis competence and limited the improvement of their English level. According to recent years'College Entrance Examination, English examination was no longer focused on the evaluation of single word and grammar. Instead, it turned to students' comprehensive language competence, like listening, speaking, reading and writing. In reading, what readers face directly is text. The information and regular patterns of the text are the key to reading comprehension. In English classroom teaching, the text is not only an effective carrier of text teaching for teachers, but also a tool of language information acquisition for students. So the depth and validity of the text interpretation is closely related to the quality of text teaching, and is vital for the improvement of students'scores and reading abilities.With the gradually deep of discourse research, cohesion theory aroused the interest of many scholars. Cohesion is one of the most typical discourse analysis theories, which is helpful to English reading comprehension. Many linguistic researches have shown that:Language cohesion can inspire and guide language teaching directly, especially in training students' English reading ability. Reviewing the relevant literatures and researches abroad and at home, the author find out a large scale of researches on cohesion theory, but most of the researches made by the earlier generations are intended for the teaching of writing, speaking and listening, and some of the them are theoretical researches related to only one type of the cohesion theory. They cannot be applied directly to the guidance of English reading teaching in senior high school.This thesis aims to explore the feasibility of applying cohesion theory to teaching senior English text. Taking cohesion theory put forward by Halliday and Hasan as the main theoretical foundation, the author analyzed the textbooks of senior high school (NEW SENIOR ENGLISH FOR CHINA,2007) and conducted an experimental research in Zhengzhou No.2 Middle School of Henan Province.The research methods used in this thesis are literature research, questionnaire, interview, classroom observation and experiment. The author chose two liberal arts classes randomly of Grade two students as the subjects for the study and carried out an experimental teaching for a month. Before the experiment, the author gave a pre-test questionnaire survey to both the students in experimental class and the control class, in order to have general information of present situation of the students' reading. Then, the author gave all the students a pre-test in order to test the students' English reading comprehension ability. The experiment on experimental class can be broadly divided into three steps:First, the teacher introduced the concept, function and effects of cohesion theory. Then the author explained their specific usage with the help of a sample reading from the textbook. The last step was to give students feedbacks. At the end of the experiment, gave all the students English reading comprehension test, and collected the results as post-test data. To make supplement, the author also did some interviews and classroom observations during the experiment.Through a large scale of textbook analysis, literature research and experiment, this thesis draws the following conclusions:Cohesion theory has a significant effect on improving students' comprehensive language using ability, especially the ability to understand the text as a whole. In English text teaching, the application of cohesion theory can strengthen students' discourse awareness and strategy awareness and improve their reading speed. Applying cohesive devices to the text interpretation can help readers to guess the meanings of the new words, predict the plot, analyze the macro text structure, grasp the main idea and speculate the writer's intention. Therefore, it can give students more confidence and more interest in reading, and provide a new way and teaching strategy in teaching for high school English teachers.