| The teaching of reading has long been considered as one of the most important part of second or foreign language learning. The real purpose of the teaching of ESL reading is to cultivate learners' reading ability and text competence in order to increase students' text competence and improve their reading ability. With the deeper research on the process of reading, both reading theories and reading teaching methods have been improved a lot. Till now, the reading teaching models has gone through from the traditional method, i.e. bottom-up model, to top-down model, to the interactive model, to the schema-reading model, and to the discourse-based reading model. They all have their own advantages, and have contributed a lot to the teaching of reading. 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. So the direct way to quickly grasp the summary of the text at the text level still has to be studied. Therefore, the author argues that cohesion, especially lexical cohesion, as an important feature of a text, contributes a great deal to reading comprehension. The present study was conducted to find out a model in ESL reading teaching to help learners with this kind of ability.Based on Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theory, this thesis attempts to apply Hoey's patterns of lexical cohesion in text to the college English reading teaching to establish a new model - the lexical cohesion-based reading teaching model - to improve learners' reading ability and help them to raise their reading comprehension. 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. So this model emphasizes the cohesion-based reading teaching model that is based on the text level, and focuses understanding of the text as a whole. In order to verify the feasibility of the study, an experiment is designed and conducted.This study undertakes a pre-test/post-test equivalent groups design and uses a convenient sample, which are two intact classes from the Human Science Department in Xijing University - two News Editing class. The two classes are respectively regarded as the control class (CC) and the experimental class (EC). There are a total of 110 (55 students in each 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 110 students. Students in the experimental class receive training in reading strategy by means of lexical cohesive 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 new model of reading teaching is helpful to students' reading ability and reading comprehension. The model can raise the students' awareness of lexical cohesion in a text and help them to quickly grasp the main idea and form the summary of the text. It is beneficial for students to understand a text as a whole.This thesis consists of seven parts. Chapter One is the introduction to the thesis, which briefly introduces the importance of reading, the situations and problems of English reading teaching as well as the significance and purpose of the study. Chapter Two is a literature review that discusses the research situations overseas and home. Chapter Three is mainly about the Hoey's lexical cohesion theory which contributes to the cohesion-based reading teaching model, as well as the nature and process of reading, the reading activities and strategies. Chapter Four is concerned with the application of the new cohesion-based reading teaching model into practice. Chapter Five introduces the methodology, including the hypothesis, subjects, instruments and the experiment. Chapter Six discusses the data collection and analysis of the results from students' questionnaires and tests. Chapter Seven is the conclusion that sums up the main idea that this model of reading teaching is helpful to students' reading ability and reading comprehension. It can raise students' understanding of a text as a whole. Finally, the implications and limitations of the thesis are given. Meanwhile, some suggestions for further research are also put forward. |
