A Study Of Teaching Discourse Grammatical Cohesive Devices In High School English Reading Class

Some researches suggest that most high school students are unable to read in context.And this issue does not receive adequate attention and research that it deserves because traditional English reading teaching focuses basically on the knowledge and skills at lexical and syntactical levels.In addition to the knowledge and skills,however,the acquisition of meaning including contextual meaning is one of the goals of reading.Discourse analysis has been proved to be effective in readers' acquisition of context meaning,and is believed to be of theoretical and practical significance for teaching English reading in high school.Grammatical cohesive devices of discourse analysis are explicit in a text and could be relatively easily noticed by readers.So teaching the devices is an important and feasible way to develop students' discourse awareness and discourse analysis ability.In light of the National English Curriculum Standard for High Schools(2017)and the current English reading teaching practice in high schools,the research attempts to answer the following two questions.First,what is the influence of grammatical cohesive devices on senior high school students' English reading proficiency? And how? Second,what are the ways and effects of cultivating the ability of grammatical cohesive devices of senior high school students?The research selects two classes of tenth graders in a high school as subject.It collects relevant data in duration of three months.The analysis and discussion of the data reveals that the English reading teaching experiment is effective in improving students' reading proficiency.The teaching experiment shows that students are more capable in the application of the reference and ellipsis devices in facilitating reading comprehension than in that of the substitution device.There is a very slight improvement in their reading proficiency when it concerns with the application of the substitution device.In addition,the research provides an approach for teaching the cohesive devices.In the several classes at the beginning,the teacher systematically presented student with the knowledge of the devices,and after that the teacher askedthe students to revise some texts by using the devices to achieve cohesion and coherence.The research also formulates its implications,limitations and suggestions for further studies.