Lexical Cohesion Of Text And Its Application To The Teaching Of ESL Reading

The teaching of reading has long been viewed as one of the most important parts of ESL. The real purpose of the teaching of ESL reading is to develop learners' reading ability and text competence in order to increase students' text competence and improve their reading a.bility. It is advisable for teachers to teach ESL reading at the text level.Until now, the reading teaching model has gone through from the traditional model, i. e. bottom-up model, to the interactive reading model, to the schema-reading model, and to the discourse-based reading model. They all have their own advantages, and have contributed a lot to the teaching of reading. However, the direct method to quickly grasp the summary of the text in macrostructure still has to be studied.Given the importance of cohesion in text understanding, the present study was conducted to find out a model in ESL reading teaching to help learners with this kind of ability. On the basis of Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theory, this thesis attempts to apply Hoey's patterns of lexical cohesion in text to the college English reading teaching to establish a new reading model — the cohesion-based teaching model of reading, because it provides the topic macrostructure in learners' minds resulting in greater overall comprehension.The model based on cohesion in ESL reading teaching has the features as follows: reading comprehension is conducted at the micro and macro levels. It is based on discourse theory and the theory of interactive reading, emphasizing understanding of a text as a whole in macrostructure and links of high-frequency words at text level.Now a lot of researches home and abroad focus much on the application of foreign learning, segmentation and automatic summarization by using the computer, but fewer studies contributed to the empirical researches in reading teaching. Different from previous research projects, the present study intends to emphasize the cohesion-based teaching model of reading that is based on the text level. It stresses the relationship between cohesive links that is hierarchical order instead of the linear one, which means lexical repetition forms a bonding that can be used to identify the different categories of sentences such as topic opening, topic closing, central sentences and marginal sentences. These sentences can then be used to generate text summaries of different types. Therefore, the cohesion-focused method is only suitable to non-narrative essays. The present study differs from previous researches based on cohesion in that it focuses on the understanding of a text as a whole but not on individual ties. It means that the study of lexical cohesion must be essentially a study of how cohesion organizes text rather than how cohesive tiescan be classified (Hoey, 1991:3). In order to verify the feasibility of the study the pedagogical activities were designed.This thesis consists of seven parts. Chapter One is the introduction to the thesis, which briefly discusses the significance of the study. Chapter Two is a literature review that briefly introduces the research projects home and abroad. Chapter Three mainly discusses the theories contributing to the cohesion-based teaching model of reading, such as Halliday and Hasan's theory, in particular Hoey's theory, as well as the interactive reading theory and reading activities. There is also a comparison of the two theories. Halliday's theory contributed much to the meaning of text that is made by groups of related words found within it. Hoey's theory focused much on the understanding of a text in macro perspective. Chapter Four is mainly concerned with the application of the present research, including the introduction to the cohesion-based teaching model of reading. Chapter Five discusses the methodology, including the hypotheses, the experimental and teaching procedures. Several simple methods of identifying a bonding are provided. Through three kinds of questionnaires, the subjects' learning situation and methods were obtained. In order to learn whether the model contributes to improvement of the subjects' ability of reading, t-tests were conducted to verify the significance between the experimental class (EC) and the control class (CC). Chapter Six presents the data collection and analysis of the results. Chapter Seven ends the study with the conclusion that the model of teaching reading is helpful to students' reading ability. The study can raise students' awareness of vocabulary relations in a text and form the summary of the text. It is beneficial for students' understanding of a text as a whole. Finally, some useful implications obtained from this study indicate that it is instructive for English writing. In addition, the limitations of the present research and some tentative suggestions for future research were put forward.In conclusion, the study tracks down the relationship between cohesion and reading. It provides teachers with the new model of reading teaching. The results of the experiment support the hypothesis that the cohesion-based teaching model of reading can help students improve their reading ability.