The Application Of Cohesion Theory To Teaching Reading Comprehension Through “Five Out Of Seven” For College Entrance Examination

Since 2016,Fujian province has abandoned the long-used “Fujian Test Paper” in the college entrance examination of English subjects and replaced it with the “National Test Paper”.What is different is that there is a type of question that examinees in Fujian Province have never seen.We call it “Choosing Five out of Seven Alternatives” reading comprehension.Facing this new type of question,many examinees in Fuzhou Hua Qiao Middle School are at a loss,so that the score rate of this type of question is low.Therefore,to find an effective way to improve students' scores is particularly urgent.In 1976,Halliday and Hassan published the book Cohesion in English,which marked the formal establishment of Cohesion Theory.They believe that cohesion is a semantic concept,which refers to the semantic relationship between textual language components.Some existing studies have shown that the theory has a significant positive effect on improving students' reading performance.However,there are few studies on the application of this theory on the teaching of “Choosing Five out of Seven Alternatives” reading comprehension,especially empirical studies.This study adopted literature research method,questionnaire survey method,interview method and control experiment method.The author selected 96 students from class 7 and class 8,Senior 1 of Fuzhou Huaqiao Middle School as the research object,and then divided them into the experimental class and the control class.During experiment,the author adopted the traditional teaching method for the control class,and the teaching method guided by Cohesion Theory for the experimental class.The purpose of this study is to answer the following two questions:(1)What is the current situation of learning and teaching of “Choosing Five out of Seven Alternatives” reading comprehension in senior high school?(2)After the different teaching of this type of question,are there differences in the performance of students in the experimental class and the control class?For these three questions,in the first half of the paper,the author elaborated on the theoretical basis,analyzed the characteristics of this type of question,and illustrated the teaching process of the experimental class.After that,different teachings were carried out in the experimental class and the control class,in order to explore whether the teaching based on the theory could improve the students' performance.After SPSS analysis,it is found that compared with the control class,the students in the experimental class has improved their scores.It is proved that Cohesion Theory is helpful to improve students' performance in “Choosing Five out of Seven Alternatives” reading comprehension.