The Investigation And Practical Research On Adverbial Conjunctions In The Reading Discourses Of English Test In Jiangsu CEE

Jiangsu Province designs its own College Entrance Examination(abbreviated as CEE).The English test in Jiangsu CEE has a great degree of difficulty and discrimination.Reading comprehension accounts for the largest proportion in the English test,so it can directly affect the students’ English marks,even has great influence on their total scores in CEE.Thus,no matter in class teaching or exercise training,reading comprehension is the most important part that teachers and students pay great attention to.However,there are still many problems in the present reading class.The biggest problem is that a lot of teachers still use the traditional grammar-translation teaching method.This kind of method has low teaching efficiency and students’ reading ability can’t be improved.Adverbial Conjunctions(abbreviated as ACs)are a kind of words and adverbial words which can connect sentences or paragraphs in a discourse.Many scholars at home and abroad have studied ACs in detail,such as Quirk,Zhao Yuanren,and Yuan Surong.They point out that ACs not only can express the logical relationship among language elements,but also can connect the context and show the writer’s intention well.With the help of ACs in the reading discourses,students can answer reading comprehension items more quickly and correctly.As a result,students ought to pay attention to ACs.However,according to the data of questionnaires,many students have little knowledge of ACs,and teachers don’t teach ACs systematically.Thus,in order to raise students and teachers’ awareness of ACs,the author puts forward ACs-based reading teaching model,which can greatly improve students’ reading comprehension ability and make up for the defects of traditional reading teaching method.This thesis introduces the research background and significance first,and then illustrates the definition,judging benchmarks and classification of ACs.Next,the author collects the reading discourses of the past ten years’ English tests in Jiangsu CEE,and analyzes ACs which appeared in these discourses.The results of the investigation are: 1.Generally speaking,the distribution and categorization of ACs is becoming more frequent and various in the reading discourses of the past ten years’ English tests in Jiangsu CEE;2.Passage D has the largest number and categorization of ACs among four reading discourses of a test;3.ACs can help students answer reading comprehension items more efficiently.In addition,based on the practical application of ACs-based teaching model,we find that: it really can improve students’ reading comprehension ability and increase their grades in the reading part.In the end,the author proposes some suggestions for the students,teachers and test designers,hoping that all of them will attach great importance to ACs.Last but not least,the limitations of the present study are included as well.