| Reading is a major approach to language input and language acquisition, as well as an important step in developing students' overall language competence. In the long run, the improvement of reading ability is beneficial to the development of students' self-teaching ability, which is consistent with Chinese educational orientation nowadays.For years, reading classes, into which teachers put the most energy, play a vital role in China's college English teaching. However, students' reading ability needs to be improved. The author believes that the failure, to a certain extent, is resulted from the lack of corresponding theoretical instruction in reading classes. Teachers still adopt the traditional grammar-translation approach, and students know little about cohesion and coherence and are short of textual awareness.In the recent thirty years, with the springing up of discourse analysis in the west, cohesion and coherence have exerted a great impact on language research, which has brought a lot of enlightenment to reading teaching from its new perspective. In reading teaching, teachers should try to cultivate students' textual awareness, instruct them to consider the text as a whole to obtain most information text delivers and to appreciate the writer's intention. Taking a specific text from New Horizon College English for example, the author, according to the properties of reading tasks at each stage, classifies the reading process into warming-up stage, interpretation stage and critical reading stage, and elaborates the application of cohesion and coherence to reading teaching in details.To verify the feasibility of the teaching approach in reading classes, the author does a three-month comparative teaching experiment to freshmen in two classes at Jiangsu Institute of Education. The results prove that applying this theory can improve students' reading ability effectively and that the improvement is much more obvious to those having acquired certain language competence. |
