Study On Improving Students Reading Efficiency With Theories Of Discourse Cohesion And Discourse Structure

We acquire knowledge,gain experience and promote communicating ability with others through reading.It is quite essential and significant to improve students' reading skills and efficiency in senior high school English teaching.Nevertheless,in daily reading teaching,teachers generally use traditional ways of reading teaching:differing the meanings of words,translating sentences or explaining difficult grammar rather than teaching reading skills.Therefore,Students ignore the lexical and discourse relations among sentences,paragraphs and even the whole discourse.Worse still,they do not understand discourse or textual structures and how to use the analytical way to accelerate reading speed,which will restrict improvement of their reading ability.Theories of discourse cohesion and discourse structure provide good solution to the problems.This thesis does research on the connections between lexical cohesion,discourse structure and reading teaching in order to probe the methods of reading teaching and upgrade students' reading efficiency.The reading texts/discourses in SEFC Modules 3 and 4 and English papers of college entrance examinations are used to analyze how to guess new words,identify collocation,adopt discourse cohesion and apply discourse structures or schemas in reading.With the relevant theories of synonyms,lexical cohesion,collocation and discourse structure analysis,the thesis analyzes different reading discourses,motivate students to follow and develop their own way of reading effectively.The author chooses the commonly applied method of experimental contrast,deciding one of his two classes to be the experiment class(EC)and the other the control class(CC)whose reading is still taught in usual methods.The EC is taught with the mentioned theories while reading,hoping for them to grasp some skills and understand meaning and structure of a discourse.It is expected through a certain period(5 months)of training,the EC can form a good habit of fast and efficient reading,improving discourse comprehending competence individually,realizing the inter change from learning to free voluntary reading.The data from the posttest proves that lexical cohesion and discourse structure theories really help students advance their reading efficiency.