The Application Of Cohesion Theory To English Reading Teaching In Township High Schools

Reading ability is a critical ability for English learners to obtain and take advantage of the useful information for further study and it can produce an effect on learners’ other English skills.The improvement of reading ability can greatly facilitate the boost of language comprehensive competence.Whereas,most English teachers in township high school still place much emphasis on the teaching of vocabulary and grammar.Their awareness of facilitating the promotion of students’ reading ability through optimizing teaching strategy,improving teaching method systematically and cultivating students’ good reading habits is not strong enough.There are some limitations existing in the present teaching approach.At the same time,the reading methods that students master are relatively single.Their ability to use reading skills to comprehend the text is far from anticipation.As an indispensable constituent part of discourse analysis,cohesion theory can provide students with some practicable methods to understand and grasp the text content.Therefore,this study tries to apply cohesion devices into practical reading teaching in township high school,aiming to explore the effectiveness of this teaching method.Three questions are to be solved in this study:1.Can the students’ awareness of utilizing cohesion methods in reading be raised by the cohesion-oriented teaching?2.In which aspects of cohesion devices is the learning effect most evident after the students receive the cohesion-oriented teaching?3.Can the improvement of students’ reading ability be achieved by the cohesionoriented teaching?In the study,the author learns about the present reading situations and finds out the existing problems in township high school reading through questionnaire.According to the analysis of the problems,the author carries out experimental teaching by applying cohesion theory into English reading teaching.Eighty-five Senior One students who are from two classes of a township high school in Kunming county area are chosen as research subjects to take part in the research.Through the pre-test,both classes whose English levels were nearly equal were chosen as control class and experimental class separately.In the process of experiment,the cohesion-oriented teaching approach was employed for experimental class,the conventional teaching method was still adopted for control class as usual.Both classes took the questionnaire about the utilization of cohesion methods and tests before and after the experiment so as to make comparison.SPSS is used to process and analyze the data.The results demonstrate that not only the students’ awareness of utilizing cohesion methods in reading was raised but also the improvement of students’ reading ability was achieved by the cohesion-oriented teaching.The learning effect of the utilizations of Ellipsis,Repetition and Synonymy was most evident.In the end,some pedagogical implications are provided as reference for the cohesion-oriented reading teaching in the future.At the same time,some suggestions are also given on account of the limitations of this study.