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Study on Teaching of English Reading in Senior High School in the Perspective of Cohesion Theory

Author: LuoHongFang
Tutor: LiYi
School: Guangzhou University
Course: Subject Teaching
Keywords: cohesion reading teaching application
CLC: G633.41
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2011
Downloads: 49
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Abstract

Reading plays an important role in English learning. In recent years, experts from home and abroad have laid much emphasis on the study of reading theories, therefore, some valuable reading theories appear, such as bottom-up model, top-down model, the interactive teaching model and the schema theory. This thesis mainly introduces the cohesion theory and its application in the reading teaching. By applying the theory to English reading teaching, the students have a good command of the common cohesive devices, cultivate their discourse reading skills, improve their reading ability and make them learn how to read to meet the requirements of The New English Curriculum Standards and the college entrance examination.Cohesion theory is one of the most important theories in the discourse theories. Cohesive devices can be found in each article, including grammar cohesion and lexical cohesion. Grammar cohesion includes reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction, while lexical cohesion refers to repetition, synonymy, hyponymy and collocation. Cohesion is a means to unravel the structure and textuality of texts and uncover the writer’s intended meaning efficiently. The application of cohesion in reading helps students form a good strategy of reading based on text and deal with a text as a whole, knowing how to decode the text efficiently and logically, how to learn to read and how to enjoy reading.Because of the significance of the study on cohesion theory in reading teaching, this thesis is an experimental probe into applying cohesion theory to the teaching of English reading comprehension, based on some experts’ theories, such as Halliday and Hasan, which is helpful to improve students’ reading ability.The participants of the study were 106 Chinese EFL students in Class 10 & Class 11, Senior 2. Class 10 were chosen to be the experimental class (EC), and Class 11 served as the control class (CC). The whole experiment lasted for 20 weeks. Before the experiment,210 copies of questionnaires were distributed to investigate the problems existing in the teaching and learning and 204 copies were collected in the end. The content of the questionnaires involved the factors causing students’ difficulty in reading, students’ application of reading strategies, teachers’ instruction in reading strategies and teachers’ teaching key points. The result of the questionnaires showed that vocabulary was the biggest obstacle in students’ reading; both the teachers and students paid little attention to the application of reading strategies; while teaching reading materials, teachers just focused on vocabulary and grammar. After finishing the questionnaires, students took a pre-test. The data of the pre-test showed that the two classes’reading scores stayed at the same level before the experiment. By analyzing the data of the questionnaires and the pre-test, the author suggested applying cohesion to the reading teaching and put forward the hypothesis that the application of cohesion theory in English reading teaching helps to improve the students’ reading ability.In the process of the experiment, the teacher applied cohesion theory to guide reading teaching in the experimental class and helped them identify the cohesive devices, while the students in the control class were taught in the traditional method, which focused on vocabulary and grammar. Except the teaching method, the two classes had the same teaching materials and exercise materials. The whole experimental procedure was divided into two periods:In the first period, with the help of reading materials in the textbook, basic cohesive devices were introduced to the students in the experimental class; In the second period, the teacher applied cohesion theory to the reading teaching and instructed the students to analyze the reading materials with the grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion.At the end of the experiment, the data of the pre-test and the post-test were compared and analyzed. At the same time, a Z-test was adopted to verify the hypothesis. The data indicated that there was obvious difference in the mean scores between these two classes. According to this, the author drew the conclusion that the application of cohesion theory was feasible in the practical reading teaching, and the students who received training in cohesion theory performed better in reading than those not.The whole experiment demonstrated that the cohesion-oriented teaching method was suitable for the students and it could improve their reading ability. Meanwhile, it helped students strengthen their discourse awareness and strategy awareness, improve the reading speed and increase their confidence.

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