Cohesion And Reading Comprehension

This paper confines the discussion on theory and practice of cohesion and some other theories of discourse analysis may occasionally be touched upon.Discourse analysis is concerned with a study of language in use. It's a way of describing and understanding how language is used. And cohesion, one of the most significant theories of discourse analysis, is realized partly through grammar and partly through vocabulary and is therefore identified as the following two categories: grammatical cohesion which includes reference, ellipsis, substitution and conjunction; and lexical cohesion which refers to reiteration and collocation. Cohesion gives us a motivation and a means to unravel the structure and textuality of texts and uncover the writer's intended meaning efficiently.The properties of reference, ellipsis and substitution all contribute to assuming as much as we can from the context. Keeping in mind the nature of grammatical cohesion helps us not only learn grammar efficiently but also learn to finds clues to full meaning of text successfully. Conjunction often gives clues to the readers and makes the decoding easier. Besides, it also brings hints of teaching arts to the teachers to enable them to carry out their teaching reading schedules smoothly and efficiently.And the recurrent of features of lexicons, especially of text- organizing words can be exploited in reading teaching or learning as a top-down decoding device as well as a bottom-up decoding device. Both devices contribute to giving hints provided by lexical cohesion and enable readers to figure out textual patterns, main ideas and supporting details successfully, and then promote their abilities to decode the whole text efficiently.Thanks to the significance of Cohesion in text reading, I, in this paper, based on the point of view of Halliday and Hasan in combination with real cases and present situations in secondary school reading teaching, explores how we can achieve a better application of Cohesion in the reading teaching with the aim of promoting students' reading abilities.