An Empirical Study Of English Reading Teaching In Vocational College From The Perspective Of Cohesion Theory

For Business English major students in vocational college, BEC (CambridgeBusiness English Certificate) is a primary standard of evaluating their English level. InBEC, the reading part is a main factor that makes the examinees fail the examination.When the students are reading, most of them just read the each word or sentence inisolation, and put the emphasis on the single words which they do not understand. Theyseldom pay attention to the whole sentence or the whole paragraph and analyze thesemantic relationship between different linguistic units. In BEC, the reading passages aremeaningful texts. If an empirical research with cohesion theory guidance can be made forbusiness English majors in vocational college, some technique and method to improvereading teaching may be found.This empirical study is based on a bold hypothesis: cohesion theory, as a learningstrategy will greatly enhance the reading effect and comprehending ability of the businessEnglish majors in vocational college. The six-month study is conducted among60second-year Business English major students in two natural classes in a vocational college,who are divided into the control group and the experimental group for comparison. In theexperimental group, the approach of teaching and learning reading under the cohesiontheory is adopted, while in the control group, the traditional teaching approach is applied.The questions are presented before the experiment:1) Whether the approach of teachingand learning reading under the cohesion theory can help the business English majors invocational college form a positive attitude towards English reading learning.2) Whetherthis approach can help the vocational college students to understand the inner meaning ofa text.3) Whether this approach can help the vocational college students partially improvetheir reading ability in BEC (Vantage) test. The thesis applies Halliday and Hasan’scohesion theory as a guide and also adopts Zhang Delu’s implicit theoretical mode in thebusiness English reading teaching. Grammar cohesion and lexical cohesion are used toanalyze the pragmatic functions in BEC (Vantage) passages. The grammar cohesion devices (reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction) are used to find the keyinformation in the texts; the lexical cohesion devices such as repetition and collocation toget the relevant information correctly in the text. Teachers who apply grammar and lexicalcohesion analyzing method in business English reading teaching can conduct the studentsget passage information very quickly. The teacher also can design various activities suchas group discussion, presentation or group competition to construct a combination ofcohesion approaches and reading practice to help them acquire the function of cohesiontheory and develop their business English reading ability.After six-month reading teaching practice, the results of the comparison between pre-and post-questionnaires, pre-and post-BEC (Vantage) reading tests of the two groupsshows that both of the score and the performance of experimental group is more obviousincreased than they are in the pre-test and the control group. The students’ interests ofreading has been raised, the initiative and confidence of reading has been enhanced. Theycan understand the inner meaning of the passages and their scores have been moreobviously increased. The correct ratio of total marks in pre-test are41%(EG) and42%(CG), but after six-month practice with different teaching methods, the correct ratio of EGis82%and the correct ratio of CG is61%. It is clear to see that the business Englishreading ability in both of the groups has been improved in the post-test, however, thecorrect ratio of EG in post-test is21%higher than the correct ratio of CG, so theexperiment indicates that the hypothesis is right: the business reading teaching invocational college with cohesion theory indeed can enhance the students’ readingefficiency.The research discovers that using the method of cohesion theory to guide the businessEnglish reading teaching is superior to the traditional reading teaching method. It mainlydisplays in:1) the grammar cohesive devices such as reference, substitution, connecting,and ellipsis can help learners to get the key information in discourse;2) the repetition andcollocation of lexical cohesion means can help students to quickly capture the similar orrelated information;3) implicit theoretical mode can guide students to understand cultural background, language style and the inner clues of the passage. Admittedly, theteacher can to gain ideal reading teaching effect and better stimulate students’ interest inlearning through applying cohesion theory to business English reading teaching, but itremains to be further exploration and research.