A Study Of The Application Of Cohesion Theory In English Reading Teaching At Senior High Schools

Reading is one of the most important parts in senior high English teaching.How to improve students’English reading ability and interest has become a crucial subject for the English teachers.It is an undeniable fact that English,an essential information carrier,has been the most universal language in each field of national economies and people’s daily lives.And English Curriculum Standard clearly indicates that the ultimate objective is to cultivate learners’comprehensive competence of language.However,the present situation of high school English reading teaching is not perfect.And students pay more attention to vocabulary and grammar in English reading.It is difficult for them to guess the word meaning,grasp the text structure as well as skim or scan the text as a whole.Therefore,it is extremely urgent to improve the methods and means towards English reading teaching of senior high school for the purpose of improving students’English reading proficiency and interest.In 1962,Halliday first put forward the concept of cohesion.In 1976,Halliday and Hasan published the book Cohesion in English,which developed cohesion and established Cohesion Theory.In fact,Cohesion Theory is an important part in discourse analysis,which can offer a unique perspective for foreign language teaching.More specifically,Cohesion Theory analyzes the relations in different semantic units based on the text structure.Besides,Cohesion Theory can be divided into two types:grammatical devices and lexical devices.In general,the cohesion-based teaching method places more emphasis on the ability of students’comprehensive reading and discourse analysis.The author attempts to apply this new method to English reading teaching and explores whether it can improve students’reading proficiency and arouse their interest by helping them master cohesive devices in a text.Therefore,this paper tries to answer the following two questions:i.What are the advantages of Cohesion Theory in English reading teaching at senior high schools?ii.In what aspects does the application of Cohesion Theory improve senior high school students’English reading ability?In order to prove the above two hypotheses,the author put Cohesion Theory into high school English reading teaching from September 4^th,2017 to December 17^th,2017.Before the experiment,two classes who had the same level confirmed with a pre-test in Grade Two from Xiangcheng Senior High School of Xuchuang were selected as experimental subjects.Class Five was chosen as the experimental class（EC）,Class Six is the control class（CC）.Besides,the author applied the teaching method based on Cohesion Theory in the experimental class,while in the control class the traditional teaching method was adopted.Except that the teaching approaches were different,all other things,such as the teaching materials,teaching time were equal.The experimental research lasted 13 weeks to prove the influence of Cohesion Theory on students’English reading ability by analyzing the post-test of the two classes.More importantly,SPSS software played an important role in analyzing the pre-test and post-test.In addition,the author employed the questionnaire and interview to study the change of students’English reading interest and attitude in the experimental class before and after the experiment.According to the analysis of test data,it showed that there were significant differences between the two classes in terms of reading ability after the experiment.And through analyzing the questionnaires and interviews,the researcher found that students had a positive attitude toward English reading.Therefore,the application of Cohesion Theory could significantly enhance students’English reading proficiency and their interest,attitude and confidence.Besides,this method has great guiding pedagogical significance in English reading teaching.However,due to the deficiency of the author’s ability and objective reasons,there are some limitations in this paper in some respects,so the author also puts forward some suggestions for improvement.