A Study Of The Effects Of Logical Connectors On English Discourse Comprehension Of Senior High School Students

Reading is an essential part of English integrated ability in English instruction.As for senior high school students,English proficiency can be largely enhanced by improving comprehensive ability at discourse level.In reading,logical connectors can help readers to have a clearer and deeper understanding of inner connection between different parts of the text.As one of cohesive de'vices,logical connectors have received great attention from language research.Quite a lot of scholars have focused their studies on the influence of logical connectors in English learning.However,researches by empirical approach remain deficient in dealing with the effect of logical connectors on English discourse comprehension of senior high school students.Based on cohesion theory,100 students of two liberal arts classes in No.1 Senior High School of Yuanjiang Hunan Province were taken as the research subjects.Two research questions have been explored:(1)To what extent can senior high school students consciously use logical connectors to comprehend English discourse in their reading?(2)To what extent will logical connectors affect the English reading proficiency of senior high school students?In this research,reading tests,questionnaires and interviews were used for the statistics in the experiment.And the collected data were analyzed with SPSS 21.0.The research findings are as follows:firstly many senior high school students can not effectively use logical connectors to comprehend English discourse in reading.They have little understanding of logical connectors and vague concepts of them.More than half of students can not grasp the text structure and predict the meaning by using logical connectors.Secondly,logical connectors have positive effects on students' reading ability to some extent.They can be of some help for students to understand the correlation between different components of sentences,thus effectively improving students' reading proficiency.In consideration of the positive effect of logical connectors on English discourse comprehension,in reading teaching,students should actively make use of logical connectors to comprehend the text.English instructors should make a point of stressing the value of logical connectors for their grasp of the text structure and meaning.In daily reading practice,they can help students to identify and utilize different kinds of logical connectors to predict and infer the author's perspective and attitude.