A Study On The Influence Of Reading Ability On The Use Of Discourse Cohesive Devices In English Summary Writing For High School Students

In the acquisition of English,English summary writing,an assignment in which both reading and writing are combined,requires competence in capturing key information during reading and in writing coherent texts.During reading the discourse,reading ability and intentional attention contribute greatly to comprehension input.As for writing,students who have mastered cohesion theory are more likely to write coherent and fluent summaries.Hence,based on the Noticing Hypothesis and Output Hypothesis,this thesis seeks to explore the relationship between the improvement of English reading and writing ability for high school students and the use of cohesive devices in discourse by answering three research questions:(1)Does overall reading ability influence on the usage of cohesive devices in summary writing?(2)Which specific reading skills have influences on the usage of cohesive devices in summary writing?(3)What relationship exists between reading ability and the use of cohesive devices in summary writing?Firstly,the analysis of practical cases reveals that overall reading ability does not affect students’ use of reference,conjunction,and collocation,but affects their use of substitution,reiteration,and ellipsis in summary writing.It is observed that each reading skill investigated affects the use of reiteration.Among them,the skill in capturing details and the skill in capturing main idea have moderately positive correlations with the use of reiteration,but there is a significantly negative correlation between the skill in capturing text structure and the use of reiteration.Secondly,all reading skills other than the skill in capturing main idea have impacts on the use of ellipsis and substitution.In particular,the skill in understanding vocabulary and the skill in reasoning have moderately positive correlations with the use of ellipsis,while the skill in capturing details and the skill in capturing purpose are moderately positively correlated with the use of substitution.In addition,the skill in capturing details has a non-significant impact on the use of reference.Besides,the skill in capturing main idea and the skill in understanding vocabulary have impacts on the use of collocation,with the skill in capturing main idea having a significantly negative correlation with the use of collocation.Thirdly,most students have mastered some knowledge of cohesive devices,but only about one-third of them use cohesive devices regularly.The interview results also reveal that English teachers do not fully convey relevant knowledge of cohesive devices.It is necessary to improve students’ application of cohesive devices in summary writing through reading training,so as to help them enhance their English writing ability.