A Study Of Cohesion And Coherence Based English Reading Teaching In Junior Middle Schools

Reading teaching is one of the most important components of middle school English teaching,so teachers usually pay attention to the cultivation of students’ reading ability.However,traditional English reading teaching focuses much more on vocabulary,sentence structures and grammar knowledge than holistic analysis of a text,context analysis,and cohesion and coherence in a text.Thus,it seems that the traditional teaching methods are not effective enough to improve students’ reading ability.The skill of cohesion and coherence is very important for middle school students to develop their reading ability.This thesis focuses on the application of cohesion and coherence theory in the teaching of English reading in middle schools,and attempts to prove that the teaching method of English reading based on cohesion and coherence can improve students’ reading ability.This study aims to answer the three questions:1,What are the types and language devices of cohesion and coherence in the reading texts of the English textbooks of Shandong Education Press(SDEP)?2,What kind of teaching methods should be adopted for different types and language devices?3,What is the effect of teaching methods on students’ acquisition of cohesive and coherent skills? What is the effect of cohesion and coherence skills on students’ overall reading ability?The study takes 90 ninth grade students from two parallel classes as research subjects and is carried out with the aid of five research instruments,including pre-questionnaire and post-questionnaire,English reading pre-test and post-test,an interview,SPSS software and teaching material analysis.According to the experiment and analysis of the results,the main findings are:First,reference is the most frequently used cohesive device in the texts of ninth grade textbooks published by Shandong Education Press;the second most frequently used one is lexical cohesion and substitution;the least used one is ellipsis.Among them,reference,lexical cohesion and conjunction affect students’ reading test scores most.Second,during the research procedure,it analyzes the teaching materials in detail andshows the relevant teaching methods corresponding to different means of cohesion.In addition to the traditional grammar-translation method,teaching method,classroom discussion method and so on,the teacher should also explain to students the application methods and conditions of cohesion theory.Teachers should focus on cultivating students’ sense of cohesion and coherence in teaching.Practically,teachers can provide students with a variety of related exercises such as cloze for students to build their skills of using cohesive devices in reading.Third,the English reading teaching based on the application of cohesion and coherence can make students read more efficiently and can improve the students’ overall reading ability.The students have become more confident in their English reading proficiency and more interested in reading after the their acquisition of relevant knowledge and skills.