| Being defined as one of the most important language skills, reading has always had a prominent position in English 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, the teaching of reading is not so satisfactory up to now. Most college students still have a lot of problems in reading comprehension, especially when they are confronted with questions concerning the understanding of the text as a whole and the implied meaning in text. One of the reasons is that most students as well as English teachers neglect the role and characteristics of text as the basic and essential factor for text interpretation.The past three decades have witnessed fast development of text linguistics, in which cohesion theories are a significant part. The author of this thesis argues that cohesion, especially lexical cohesion, contributes a great deal to reading comprehension, in which it can trigger the readers' background knowledge and give them cues to reading comprehension as well as provide constraints in the reading process. As an important factor in text interpretation, enough attention should be given to lexical cohesion in the reading teaching practice.However, the research designed by the author to examine the cohesive awareness of college students shows that non-English major students do not have a strong awareness of these cohesive devices. In the reading process, most of them can not recognize or take advantage of these cohesive devices, including lexical cohesion, to construct and interpret a coherent text. Meanwhile, some college English teachers do not pay attention to cultivating students' awareness of lexical cohesion in teaching, not to mention putting these relating theories into practical use. Therefore, in order to improve non-English major students' cohesive awareness and their reading ability at text level, further training on textual cohesion is quite necessary in English teaching..After comparing Halliday and Hasan's Cohesion in English to Hoey's Patterns of Lexis in Text, we can find the former can be applied more widely. Moreover, because college students had studied English for at least 6 years before they enrolled in institutions of higher education, they have acquired a certain amount of language knowledge, text knowledge and world knowledge. Without much instruction, the students can understand the cohesion theory and undertake text analysis. All these enable them to participate in various activities on the basis of cohesion theory designed by the teacher in class. Therefore, based on the results of Halliday's research, together with some of Hoey's viewpoints, the author of this thesis attempts to apply lexical cohesion theory in the actual teaching of reading, that is, establish a lexical cohesion-based English reading teaching model.In this thesis, different types of lexical cohesion in English text and their functions are analyzed. To make it more pertinent, nearly all the examples are taken from New College English (Second Edition), which is a very good textbook for college students. The new teaching model emphasizes understanding a text as a whole in macrostructure and links of high-frequency words at text level. Through pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading activities, the students actively make use of reading strategies and skills to get a thorough comprehension of a text. They can grasp comparatively fast the structure of the text, seize the theme and potential meaning of the text, identify the details and understand the writer's attitude and view.The lexical cohesion-based model is expected to be efficient in college English reading teaching, which clearly shows the requirement for improving English teaching from the textual perspective and also the importance and necessity of training on lexical cohesion awareness among the college students. However, this thesis has its own limitations and needs to be perfected in future study.
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