Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of the study
With the influence of information society, more and more people have realized theimportance and significance of English reading proficiency. The demand for Englishlanguage and English language education has increased greatly with economicglobalization. It is the language of business, technology, science, the internet, popularentertainment and even sports (Crystal, 1997). English reading is supposed to be the mostimportant part of English language learning class. Being defined as one of the mostimportant language skills, reading has got a more important position in English teachingand learning. So cultivating and improving the students’ reading ability has become one ofthe main objectives and requirements of the English teaching.Reading is a complicated process of psycho-linguistic activity and result of interactionbetween language and thought. Its comprehension requires cooperation of the readers’related organs, knowledge structure and reading processing strategies skills. Traditionally,English reading teaching mainly focuses on vocabulary and grammar separately. Mostteachers pay little attention to the discourse knowledge.The traditional foreign language teaching always pays attention to the teaching andlearning of language structures. Most of the teachers insist on using the teaching methodby explaining the words and phrases separately, for they think that it can let the studentsunderstand the whole text well. They cost lots of time to explain the individual words’meaning and the sentence’s structure. Usually, the teachers will break the paragraph intosentences and then analyze the grammar in each sentence. After that, they begin to explainthe central words and phrases. We can find that the teachers look down upon theorganization and understanding of the whole text.
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1.2 Significance of the study
As the above mentioned, there are obvious differences between students' languagecompetence and the requirements they need. How to help students improve their readingcompetence has become an urgent problem that English teachers have to figure out.With the development of study on cohesion and its effects on English reading, theresearch of cohesion should been given more attention toward more specific aspects. Thatis to say, research of detailed standpoints on cohesion and its effect on reading which is aspecial aspect of English learning will become the main focus in future English teaching incollege.Cohesive relation in a text is by means of all kinds of cohesive devices, which canhelp the readers understand the text easier and clearer. Among these cohesive devices,lexical cohesion is regarded as one of the most important and prominent, which makes upforty percent of the total cohesive devices. As described by Halliday and Hasan, lexicalcohesion is considered as the most important one of the cohesive means, but the hardestone to understand the whole text. Students can get the ability to understand therelationships and the logical relationships of the sentences, grasp the meanings of thewhole text well by using of these cohesive devices.
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Chapter Two Literature review
2.1 A review of cohesion theories and the lexical cohesion
Text is a general concept. For a long time, scholars home and abroad hold differentview about text concept. According to Halliday and Hasan (1976), text embraces bothwritten language and oral language. In linguistics, text refers to written or oral passage inany length (Halliday & Hasan, 1976). Hu Zhuanglin agrees with them very much. InCohesion and Coherence of Text, he defines text as natural language that doesn’tconstrained thoroughly by grammar and express complete meaning in certain context. Thetext involved in this book is a general one which includes both discourse and text (HuZhuanglin, 1994). However, according to Coulthard (1985), text only refers to writtenlanguage and oral language is not included. Text refers to written language exclusivelywhile discourse refers to oral language. Stubbs is all for him. He also thinks that the natureof discourse is oral communication while text is monologue without oral communication(Wang Rongpei, Yang Shan, 2011). Cook (1989) considers discourse as a series ofmeaningful complete language that serves to achieve some purpose while text is a series oflanguage divorced from the context and interpreted from the perspective of form. Thethesis here agrees with scholars like Halliday and adopts the view that text is a semanticunit in language application. It includes written language as well as oral language. It can bea word, a phrase, a clause, a diary, a song, a dialogue, a speech, an ad, a poem, a novel, aplay, a paper, etc. Whatever it is, it must be a complete semantic unit.
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2.2 Lexical cohesion theories
Halliday first came up with cohesion in 1964. Halliday and Hasan (1976) deem thatcohesion is a semantic concept which is a semantic tie. It comes up when the explanationof an element counts on the explanation of another. Cohesion is part of text organization inlanguage system. It links elements having no relation structurally by means of making thesemantic explanation of one element dependent on the explanation of another.A text is a unit of language in use, according to Halliday and Hasan (1976, 2011). Itrefers to any passage, written or spoken, of whatever level, that sets up a unified whole. Itmay be verse or prose, monologue or dialogue. A text is not summarized by its size butmay be just one word, for example "Fire!" crying for help at the sight of a house being onfire, and may be an all-day discussion on a committee. It is a semantic unit: a unit not ofform but of meaning, rather than a grammatical unit. A text is not composed of sentences;rather than it is realized by, or encoded in, sentences. The main determinant of whether agroup of sentences do constitute a text counts on cohesive ties between and within thesentences.According to Halliday and Hason (1976), cohesion falls into two categories as follows:grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. There are five types of cohesive devices, thatis, lexical cohesion, reference, ellipsis, conjunction and substitution. Hasan (1985) extendthe cohesion relations. He studied the semantic relations that can form cohesion. No matterwhat cohesive device it is, it is termed as cohesive relation as long as it has the semanticrelations which involve co-reference, co-classification, and co-extension. It cannot becohesive relation if they don’t have any of the mentioned semantic relation. Meanwhile,Hasan has also proved that cohesive relation can also be formed by means of the followingdevices: question and answer, parallelism, subject-predicate structure, message structure,identity, oppositeness, synonym, correlation.
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Chapter Three Research methodology .... 19
3.1 Research questions..... 19
3.2 Subjects .... 19
3.3 Objectives....... 19
3.4 Instruments..... 20
3.5 Experiment procedure ...... 21
3.6 Teaching procedure .... 22
Chapter Four Data analysis and discussion........ 27
4.1 Data collection ..... 27
4.2 Analysis of the first questionnaire ..... 27
4.3 Data analysis of the pre-test......... 29
4.4 Data analysis of the post-test ....... 31
4.5 Analysis of the post questionnaire ..... 32
4.6 A comparison and analysis of the scores of experiment class........ 34
4.7 Analysis the high-score group and low-score group..... 37
Chapter Five Conclusions....... 39
5.1 Major findings ..... 39
5.2 Limitation ...... 40
5.3 Implication and suggestions ........ 41
Chapter Four Data analysis and discussion
4.1 Data collection
The study tries to answer the two questions below:(1) Is the lexical cohesion theory more effective than the traditional teaching methodin improving students’ reading ability?(2) Is the lexical cohesion theory helpful to developing the students’ readingstrategies?In order to prove these two questions, it has been designed a semester contrastingteaching experiment in the applications of the lexical cohesion theory in a vocationalschool as described in Chapter Three.Data collection is an essential and important part of experiment research. Two groupsof data are collected during the experiment: (1) the scores in pre-test and post-test of bothexperiment class and control class. (2) The data of the first questionnaire and secondquestionnaire. All the collected data are used to data analysis for this experiment class. Thedata analysis results will show a scientific proof for the research. The detailed results ofthis experiment study are presented in the following.
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Conclusion
As the informationization of social life and economical globalization develop, thesocial status of English has become increasingly important. English, as one of mostimportant information media, has become the most widely used language in every field ofhuman life. It is widely recognized that reading plays an important role in improving thecomprehensive language competence in English learning.As the traditional teaching method has some shortcomings, lexical cohesion, as atextual feature, plays an important role in reading comprehension and semantic coherenceof the whole text. Lexical cohesion can provide some clues to reading and help the studentsto predict in the reading process. At the same time, they can be used as readingcomprehension signs to help the reader understand the discourse. Therefore, lexicalcohesion should be given adequate attention in the teaching of reading as an importantfactor in the discourse.
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Reference (omitted)