The Application Of Adverbial Conjunctions To The Teaching Of English Reading In Senior High School

It is generally acknowledged that English reading plays an exceedingly significant part in English learning, especially for senior high school students. Since it is the reading comprehension that accounts for a large proportion in the English test of College Entrance Examinations(abbreviated as CEE). Besides, not only can English reading help students develop language sense, but accumulate vocabulary in a more effective way. Meanwhile, it is also an effective channel for students to obtain an overwhelming amount of information and knowledge, which will broaden students’ horizons and stimulate their interests in English. Nevertheless, the questionnaire survey conducted in senior high school reveals that there still exist various issues in the reading comprehension of senior high school students. One of the most noticeable problems is that students barely attach an importance to Adverbial Conjunctions(abbreviated as ACs) which are able to demonstrate logical relationship among linguistic elements and disclose underlying meanings among lines. Worse still, teachers also ignore such type of words in the process of reading instruction, which directly contributes to students’ weak consciousness of ACs. The present thesis narrows down its research scope to “the application of Adverbial Conjunctions to the teaching of English reading in senior high school” so as to tackle this issue via an in-depth research.The present thesis first introduces research background and significance. And then, it deals with the theoretical foundations on which the research is based and relevant researches on ACs at home and abroad. Besides, it also makes a specific analysis on the definition, classification and judging benchmarks of ACs. Moreover, the advantages of applying ACs are described in detail in the thesis. Experiments are conducted to testify the validity of using ACs in Reading Instruction(abbreviated as RI) in senior high school. And the results of the experiments do show that ACs have a positive effect on the improvement of students’ performance in reading. The positive effects are as follows: firstly, there is a great improvement in the mean score of EC after the ACs-based reading teaching model is adopted; secondly, it can be found out that ACs not only serve as micro-organizers, but also act as macro-organizers; thirdly, ACs-based reading teaching model helps students enlarge their vocabulary in an unconscious manner; fourthly, this model makes students have better performance in main-idea items and the items that test their ability in logic deduction; Last but not the least, ACs-based reading teaching model has improved students’ self-confidence in English learning and stimulated their interests in English. In the conclusion part, the major findings and pedagogic implications are described. Meanwhile, the limitations of present study are pointed out and some suggestions for further study are made by the author.