Lexical Cohesion In News Discourse And Its Implications For The Teaching Of News Listening

On the basis of Hoey's Patterns of Lexis in Text, this thesis mainly analyzes the lexical cohesive devices employed in English news discourses. Lexical cohesion, one of the most important cohesive devices realized through the choices of lexis, plays an important part in the construction of the coherence and unification of a news discourse, and thus becomes a major means to form the textuality of a news discourse. This thesis mainly employs Hoey's lexical cohesion theory to analyze English news discourse from three different perspectives, namely, lexical cohesion and thematic progression in news discourse, lexical cohesion and topic of news discourse, lexical cohesion and context of news discourse. News discourse as a typical type of discourse is heavily information-loaded. The comprehension of news discourse involves some strategies in discourse analysis. Therefore, based on lexical cohesion theory news discourse can be studied from three perspectives. Firstly, lexical cohesion and thematic progression are closely related. Thematic progression is realized mainly with the help of lexis choices. Accordingly, lexical cohesion can provide us with many clues to trace and grasp the thematic progression of news discourse. Thematic progression plays a vital part in the organization and procession of a discourse, and thus, a good recognition of the thematic progression of news discourse will no doubt improve the comprehension of the discourse. Lexical cohesion is thus involved in the comprehension of the news discourse and has a significant influence on it. Secondly, lexical cohesion and discourse topic are interrelated. Discourse topic always discloses the key information and main idea of a news discourse, and as a result, the recognition of the topic of a news discourse can lead us to an easier comprehension of it as a whole. In building a discourse topic, some key lexis needs to be raised to a prominent position in the discourse, and thus, lexical devices have a critical role to play in building and identifying a discourse topic. Thirdly, lexical cohesion also contributes a lot to the prediction and recognition of the context in which the news discourse comes into being. Key lexis may reveal such key factors that compose the whole context as "time, location, participants, events..." and other background information like this. From the context of a news discourse we can foretell many related information about the topic, which can dramatically assist and improve our comprehension of the news discourse. So, learners can make a positive use of lexical cohesion to infer and predict the context of the discourse to make it easier to understand the news discourse. In this thesis, we focus on the functions that lexical cohesion has in the coherence of a news discourse. Through this analysis, we find that lexical cohesion is frequently used in English news discourse to maintain discourse coherence and unification. As an integral part of news discourse, lexical cohesion takes a prominent position in news discourse analysis and becomes a typical characteristic of English news discourse. Based on these findings, we try further to apply lexical cohesion to the teaching of English news listening in the hope that the acquisition of lexical cohesion theory may facilitate English learners' news listening comprehension and improve their listening ability and skills.