A Study On The Application Of Cohesion Theory To English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

There is no doubt that English proficiency has already become an important standard to measure one's talent these days.Good reading proficiency can benefit people for their whole life.As for senior high school students,their English reading scores can reflect their English proficiency to a large extent.Nowadays,the traditional English reading teaching method is mainly adopted in senior high schools in our country.During the process of reading teaching,most of the English teachers are used to analyze the text word by word and sentence by sentence.Overemphasizing vocabulary and grammar can be viewed as a mechanical reading teaching method,which can cause partially understanding of the text.Therefore,it is a necessity to adopt a more effective method to senior high school English reading teaching in order to help the students to analyze the text as a whole.Cohesion theory,as an important part of discourse analysis,can provide the students with some useful strategies to assist them to understand the text as a whole,which can also avoid interpreting out of context.Therefore,there is a combination between cohesion theory and senior high school English reading teaching with the aim of proving the effectiveness of this reading teaching method in this research.Two research questions are put forward in this research:Question 1: Can the application of cohesion theory to senior high school English reading teaching develop students' reading strategies?Question 2: Can the application of cohesion theory to senior high school English reading teaching improve students' reading scores effectively?In order to solve the research questions above,the experiment,which lasted for 16 weeks,was conducted in two parallel classes of Grade Two in Fuxin No.2 Senior High School,Liaoning Province.94 students from Class Four and Class Five were selected as the research participants.Class Four was chosen as the experimental class while Class Five was designed to be the control class.The questionnaires,the tests and an interview were the instruments used in this experiment.Both the two classes were given the pre-questionnaire about reading strategies and the pre-test before the experiment.In the teaching experiment,the students in the experimental class were instructed with the cohesion theory-based English reading teaching approach while the the post-questionnaire about reading strategies and the post-test were conducted in both the two classes.Besides,an interview was conducted among nine students from different levels in the experimental class at the end of the experiment to reflect the change of their reading strategy use in a qualitative way.The results of the research illustrate that applying cohesion theory to English reading teaching is an effective way to develop students' reading strategies.During the process of reading,the students have cultivated the awareness of using cohesive devices to analyze the English text.Besides,there is also an improvement of students' reading scores after receiving the reading instruction based on cohesion theory.On the contrary,there is no dramatic change of students' performance in the control class from the aspects of strategy use and reading scores.Therefore,applying cohesion theory to English reading teaching can bring positive effects to senior high school students.They master an effective reading method and have confidence in achieving better performance in English reading.At last,this research offers some pedagogical implications for the teaching practice of cohesion theory-based English reading teaching approach in the future as well as some useful suggestions based on the deficiencies of this research.