The Effects Of Textual Cohesion Instruction On The College Students' English Reading Ability

English reading course, as a course of college English instruction, is considered to be an important course. Therefore, it is necessary for researchers to further study reading instruction with the purpose of improving college students'English reading ability. Reading is a kind of language activity and what shows in this activity is called "reading ability" which involves several reading subskills (different types and different level subskills). These English reading subskills are as follows:skimming through the whole passage and catching the key points, then identifying the integral structure of the passage; confirming and grasping the main ideas, supporting details, arguments; understanding relationship between parts of a text, relationship within the sentence; recognizing the author's purpose, attitude, tone and mood; implying the known and inferred meaning; transferring information of nonlinear text, (the ability of transferring information by making eyeball bouncing between paragraphs). Improving these English reading subskills implies the improvement of English reading ability. So the direct way to effectively improve English reading subskills still has to be studied.The author argues that as an important feature of a text, cohesion, contributes a great deal to the improvement of reading ability. Cohesion, one of the most significant theories of discourse analysis, is achieved partly through overt devices and partly through covert devices. Overt cohesion includes grammatical and covert cohesion refers to situational context, cultural context and pragmatics knowledge. Readers may understand the whole text by applying kinds of cohesive devices. They also may make a good use of background knowledge to catch the writer's views and make better predictions about text meaning. So we may draw a conclusion that cohesion plays a vital role in improving college students'English reading ability.The present study is conducted to find out a model of English reading teaching to help learners with this kind of ability. The author thinks the best way of cultivating different subskills respectively during the reading process is to use related cohesive devices, in order to achieve the aim of cultivating and improving students'integrative reading ability. This study explores from the aspect of college students'English reading ability, and compares the results of two classes after completing the experiment. In different periods of time, cultivate the students from experimental class different reading subskills which is taught based on its textual cohesive device. Attempts to horizontally and vertically compare the English reading subskills of the two classes and to examine whether reading ability has been improved, and finally achieve the goal of improve students'English reading ability.This study finally shows that the training model in this study can improve the college students'reading ability. And teachers should give some textual cohesion strategy training in reading class to improve students'reading ability.