The Investigation And Application Of Adverbial Conjunctions In The Reading Discourse Of New Standard English For Senior High School Students (Shandong Edit.)

Textbooks are the core teaching materials of a course.For the students,textbooks can give them the systematic knowledge;and for the teachers,textbooks can guide them to prepare for the class.So textbooks play a very important role in both teaching and learning,and thus it would be very necessary to analyze the textbooks of New Standard English for Senior High school Students(Shandong Edit.)which will be abbreviated as NSE in the following thesis.Reading Comprehension is one of the key parts of English learning in senior high school,which also accounts for a large proportion in the English Test of College Entrance Examination.So teachers and students pay much attention to reading comprehension in senior high school.However,various investigations conducted in senior high school show that there are still some problems in the reading comprehension for senior high school students,one of which is that many students and even teachers often neglect the existence and importance of Adverbial Conjunctions(abbreviated as ACs)in the English reading discourses.According to the study of Quirk R,et al.(1985),Zhao Yuanren(1979)and Yuan Surong(2011),it‘s easy for us to draw a conclusion that ACs are one of the major cohesive devices to organize the passage into a logical and meaningful discourse.Therefore,ACs can not only reflect the logical relationship between sentences and paragraphs,but also imply the author‘s emotion and intention in the passages.As a result,this study focuses on the investigation and application of ACs in the textbooks of NSE to analyze the above problems in Shandong Province and further provide some necessary suggestions to English reading instruction with the aim to improve students‘ reading ability.The present thesis first introduces the background,objective and significance of the study.And then it deals with the current study of ACs and English reading comprehension at home and abroad.Besides,the thesis collects and analyzes the occurrence frequency of ACs in the reading discourses of NSE,based on which the thesis further studies the application of ACs to English teaching and learning.To testify the significance of ACs in reading comprehension for senior high school students,the author conducts a pre-test and post-test between the experimental class and the controlled class and uses the software of SPSS 19.0 to analyze the results.The major findings are: 1.By the investigation,we find that 1)there is a wide distribution and relevant high occurrence frequency of ACs in the reading discourses in NSE;2)there involves seven different categories of ACs in the reading discourses in NSE,even though the distribution is not even.2.By the experimental research,we find that: 1)some students and even teachers still lack some necessary knowledge of ACs;2)the awareness of ACs can contribute to students‘ reading comprehension;3)the ACs can improve students‘ logical thinking while reading.Last but not least,in the conclusion part,we summarize the major findings and provide some pedagogic implications on English reading comprehension.Meanwhile,the limitations of the present study are also pointed out with some suggestions provided for the future study.