Discourse Markers And Reading Comprehension

In recent research abroad on FL / SL reading, a lot of attention has been paid to Cohesion Theory. According to Cohesion Theory, discourse markers refer to those words that signal the logical relationships in the text and determine the starting and closing of the text.Meanwhile, reading is regarded as a complex cognitive activity, which involves the interaction between the reader and the text. The reader can predict the writer's writing strategy and the intended meaning by means of the clues provided by the writer.The research abroad has suggested that discourse markers have positive impact on reading comprehension and the reader's better knowledge of discourse markers can enable them to have a better prediction about the text structure and net the macrostructure of the text. However, little empirical research has been done in this respect. Therefore, an empirical study aimed to investigate the relationship between discourse markers and English reading of college students in China was conducted by the author of this thesis with the intention of proving that the reading strategy by means of discourse markers is efficient and effective.In collecting data, a reading test and a questionnaire survey of reading strategy and discourse markers were administered to 70 students. After the subjects were trained the reading strategy by means of discourse markers for one month, another reading test was done. The scores of them were defined as data of reading performance and the knowledge of reading strategy and discourse markers respectively. Then descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation coefficient and t-test were employed to analyze the data.The results indicated that the students had a better knowledge and use of global reading strategy than local reading strategy; global reading strategy was closely and positively related to their reading performance; in reading the students needed to know more and use more discourse markers, which was closely related to the students' reading performance; The training of the reading strategy by way of discourse markers can result in better reading comprehension.