| With the development of international business activities, Business English has become one of the most important determining factors in employment, and Business English Certificate (BEC) is playing an increasingly important role in the job market. As indicated in the previous tests, the sentence-filling section in the reading part of BEC test has always been the most difficult part for most students. Therefore, it is necessary to develop some strategies and methods to improve the students' ability to deal with this section.Since the 1950s, discourse analysis has gained achievements, and has drawn world-wide attention. However, few researches have been carried out in the field of text linguistics on BEC2, especially on the sentence-filling section.In this thesis, twelve pieces of sentence-filling texts have been chosen as the research corpus. The cohesion theory developed by Halliday and Hasan is taken as the theoretic framework. The research finds out that cohesive devices are used in quite different ways, and serve different purposes.Based on the cohesion theory, an experiment was carried out on 80 subjects who are five-year Business English majors from two classes of 2007 and another two classes of 2008 of Taizhou Normal College. The experiments were conducted both in their first semester of the last year on campus. That is, the experiment on those of 2007 was conducted in the second semester of 2006, while the experiment on those of 2008 was conducted in the second semester of 2007. Then all the data collected were analyzed with the SPSS (15.0) .Data analysis and results achieved from the experiments confirm that discourse cohesion theory plays an important guiding role in reading comprehension. By teaching reading at the discourse level, teachers can effectively avoid the defects and disadvantages of the traditional pedagogy that mainly focuses on lexis, grammar, and sentence structure analysis. In addition, when students are equipped with some cohesive devices knowledge and their discourse awareness is raised, their reading comprehension ability will be greatly increased. As a result, their performance in the sentence-filling section of BEC test will inevitably be improved. |
