The Effect Of Patterns Of Lexical Cohesion Teaching In Text On The Reading Ability Of Non-English Majors In College

Reading, as the major channel for students to get linguistic knowledge, has long been paid much attention in foreign language teaching and learning. With the deeper research on the process of reading, both reading theories and reading teaching methods have been improved a lot. However, most college students still have a lot of complaints and problems in reading comprehension, especially when they are confronted with questions concerning the understanding of the whole text and the implied meaning. The author argues that cohesion, especially lexical cohesion, as an important feature of a text, contributes a great deal to reading comprehension. It can give cues to reading comprehension and also provide constraints in reading process.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. This model 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. In order to verify the feasibility of the study, an experiment is designed which includes two questionnaires and two test papers.This study undertakes a pre-test/post-test non-equivalent groups design and uses a convenient sample, which are two intact classes from the Business School in Linyi Teachers' College - the International Economy and Trade class and Accounting class. The two classes are respectively regarded as the control group (CC) and the experimental group (EC). There are a total of 92 (45 students in the International Economics and Trade class, 47 students in Accounting class) subjects participating in the experiment. In data collection, a reading test and a questionnaire survey of reading strategy and lexical cohesion devices are given to 92 students. Students in the experimental class receive training in reading strategy by means of lexical cohesion devices for three months, and then another questionnaire and reading test are done. The scores of them are analyzed through descriptive statistics and t-test.The results show that the model of reading teaching is helpful to students' reading ability. The model can raise the students' awareness of vocabulary connections in a text and help them to form the summary of the text. It is beneficial for students to understand a text as a whole.This thesis consists of six parts, including the introduction and the conclusion. The introduction briefly introduces the importance of reading, the situations and the problems of English reading teaching in China, and the significance of the study. Chapter 1 is a literature review which briefly introduces research projects overseas and home. Chapter 2 is mainly about the Hoey's lexical cohesion theory which contributes to the cohesion-based teaching model of reading, as well as the nature and process of reading, the activities and strategies of reading, function of lexical cohesion in the understanding of a text and the model of lexical cohesion in the teaching of EFL reading. Chapter 3 discusses the methodology, including the hypothesis, subjects, instruments and the experiment. Chapter 4 introduces the analysis and discussion of the data from students' questionnaires and tests, major findings and the pedagogical implications. By using the two kinds of questionnaires, the information about whether the subjects know to use the lexical cohesion devices in reading is obtained. In order to learn whether the lexical cohesion reading model contributes to the improvement of the subjects' reading ability, pre-test and post-test papers are given to the subjects and t-tests are conducted to show the significance between the experimental class (EC) and the control class (CC). The results of the experiment support the hypothesis that the application of cohesion-based model among the non-English majors will help them to improve their reading ability in some aspects. The last part is the conclusion. The conclusion sums up the main idea, gives the limitations of this thesis and the suggestion for further research.