The Application Of Textual Cohesion In College English Reading Teaching

Reading has served much in the transmission of knowledge in human history. Second Language Reading, as the main means of language input, has always been the focus of linguistics. English reading covers a lot in college textbooks and tests. To improve students' ability in reading plays an important role in college English teaching. However, it is difficult to help students make some progress in reading. There exist many reasons, such as the shortage of students' vocabulary, the complexity of sentence structures and the lack of background knowledge, etc.. But the ignorance of cohesive devices should be one of critical negative factors. Due to the traditional method of reading teaching, too much attention has been paid to words, expressions and the analysis of long sentences, which have been considered as the main negative factors slowing down the reading speed and affecting the understanding of the text. In the past decades, with the development of linguistics, some researchers' focus has been shifted from the words and sentences to the whole text. What some researchers care about now is the texture which unites sentences into a semantic text.Cohesion, as one of major means to connect sentences into a whole text, has drawn the attention of some linguists. Halliday and Hasan have contributed a lot to this. According to them, cohesive devices include reference, conjunction, substitution or ellipsis and lexical cohesion, which make it possible that a text is realized by or encoded in sentences semantically not just structurally. When reading, readers become involved in an active process, which is called "Psycholinguistic guessing meaning game". Reading process, as it is shown, is regarded as a kind of dialogue between the reader and the text. Readers combine the knowledge brought with themselves and the information to comprehend the text. During the process of reading, cohesive devices, to some extent, are the guides or clues for readers to make the most reasonable guess of the meaning and understand what the writer intends to express as much as possible. From this perspective of view, cohesion helps a lot when readers explain some language item, which can not be defined by the language item itself.Some college students fail to show a strong awareness of cohesion. Some students are not capable of coping with cohesive language items. Most of them read the text by understanding basic language units and paying too much attention to the sentence structure rather than looking upon the text from a perspective of semantic unity. Text is a semantic unit, not structural, and cohesion is a necessary though not a sufficient condition for creation of text. Therefore, cohesion should be an important means of decoding the meaning of the text. This thesis is based on the hypotheses that improving the awareness of cohesion is helpful and effective in enhancing students' reading comprehension, which may be measured by the development of reading speed and correct understanding. The application of cohesion theory in reading teaching may be proved to be an effective and feasible way to enlighten students' reading comprehension and comprehensive language capability.