A Study Of Reading Comprehension In Nmet Based On The Discourse Marker Theory

Reading comprehension, as one of the four basic skills in English language, plays the most important role in English teaching and learning in senior high school. While, how to read the texts quickly as well as understand them accurately has become a big problem for most of the senior high school students. Discourse markers, as one of the special and important devices of cohesion, not only connect the sentence effectively as well as paragraphs, but also show the logical or semantic relations between the previous information and the following, making the text organization more explicit. So the presence of discourse markers can facilitate readers’ interpretation of the whole text effectively. And the positive effects of the discourse markers on text comprehension have been proved by several studies.National Matriculation English Test (NMET) is the most important test for senior high school students, especially for those who want to get further studies in universities. Every NMET is edited and checked by lots of renowned scholars and experts in education, so it has its own unique features and special authorities. So this thesis tries to do a research on discourse markers, regarding the reading comprehension texts in NMET as the research subject.The thesis investigates the discourse markers in NMET to find out their frequency in text comprehension by analyzing80English passages from the NMET held from2008to2010. Providing the empirical proofs, the study clearly demonstrates the features and functions of discourse markers in reading comprehension in NMET, and it also offers some pedagogical implications to both teachers and students on teaching and learning discourse markers to improve students’ reading ability.