A Study on the Application of Lexical Cohesion to ESL Reading Based on Web Materials Min Huang, Yunxia Song, and Nan Li Foreign Languages Section of Jilin University Heping Campus No. 5333 Xi an Road, Changchun, Jilin Province, China P.R. 130062 emmhuangmin@163.com Abstract. Reading, as the major channel to obtain linguistic knowledge, has long been paid much attention to in foreign language teaching and learning. With the deeper research on reading process, both reading theories and reading teaching methods have been improved a lot. In this thesis, the writer carried out an experiment with the lexical cohesion theory applied in English reading class so as to find out a better way for the students to improve their English reading ability. Keywords: Lexical cohesion; College English reading; Textual devices. 1 Research Background Discourse analysis plays a very important part in the linguistic study, sometime it could be taken as a great manner for us to understand that how the language works. Cohesion is the grammatical and lexical relationship within a text or sentence. Cohesion can be defined as the links that hold a text together and give it meaning. It is related to the broader concept of coherence. There are two main types of cohesion: grammatical, referring to the structural content, and lexical, referring to the language content of the piece. A cohesive text is created in many different ways. In Cohesion in English, M.A.K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan identify five general categories of cohesive devices that create coherence in texts: reference, ellipsis, substitution, lexical cohesion, and conjunction. The teaching purpose of the English reading course is to cultivate and develop the students ability of mastering this kind of language. The form of the cohesion in a text is showed by the cohesive devices, which could be the clue for the readers to understand the entire text. The words function of connecting is the most important textual devices to form the cohesion. Lexical cohesion develops into a cohesive chain through the entire text by choosing different words with the effection to set up the textual continuity. According to Halliday and Hsan, the lexical cohesion is the most important part contributing to the textual cohesion for it occupies forty percent of the total cohesion devices. 2 Approaches of Lexical Cohesion in the Teaching of CE Reading Research in ESL reading has suggested that learners use a variety of strategies to assist them with the acquisition and retrieval of information. These strategies consist S. Lin and X. Huang (Eds.): CSEE 2011, Part IV, CCIS 217, pp. 433 438, 2011. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011
434 M. Huang, Y. Song, and N. Li of a whole range of strategies including skimming and scanning, contextual guessing, reading for meaning, making inferences, utilizing background knowledge, recognizing text structure and so forth. There is a relationship between strategy use and reading comprehension level." Some helpful strategies used are as follows: 1. Guessing Guessing from the context is the basic reading skill, which guides students to look at contextual information outside or within the text. 2. Grasping Main Idea and Macrostructures Fast reading or a reading test is often promoted as a good way to grasp the main idea of a text, including skimming to get a top-down approach as a way of acquiring the understanding of difficult texts. Scanning is reading for specific information to find the ones that are of interest to the reader or main clue of a text. 3. Questioning The successful application of previewing depends on the presence of topic sentences and paragraphs of introduction and topic-related vocabulary. The top-down processing activity is questioning. Questions may be generated by the teachers or by the students and should be done before reading, rather than after the reading. 4. Summarization Summarization is the process of making a mental or written summary of language and information presented in a task. Many studies have examined the value of summarization as a reading strategy. Summarization actually is a series of separate operations. Students must decide what to include or eliminate, what to combine, and what language to use. 3 An Experimental Study The purpose of the experiment was to examine whether this cohesion-based reading model is feasible in practical reading teaching, and whether the students who receive training in cohesive devices will better in reading than those students without treatment. The whole experiment lasted a term and it can be divided into: 1)the preexperimental stage; 2) the classroom instruction stage and 3) the post-experiment stage. 1. Subjects The subjects being investigated were two classes students selected from.the Heping campus of Jilin University, majoring in Animal Science and Animal Medicine. The two classes were chosen randomly to serve as the EC (Experimental Class), and the others as the CC(Control Class). They have been in college for one year, experiencing two time final examinations at the end of the semester. All students in these two majors were selected according to their final term scores and their teachers acquaintance with them. There were 33 students in Animal Science class. There were 45 students in Animal Medicine class. The experiment and investigation were carried out throughout the first term of Grade two.
A Study on the Application of Lexical Cohesion to ESL Reading 435 2. Instruments The experiment was performed mainly through the following three steps: 1) the pretest was carried out at the beginning of the term to learn whether the students chosen knew the cohesion-focused method used in reading, and the post-test was administered at the end of the term to determine how much progress the students had made in their reading ability or performance through a certain period of reading instruction after the experiment. Both classes used the same textbooks: College English Integrated Course book3(new Edition of Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press). A guide of English reading was included in each unit,, which could help students learn some reading strategies. In addition, some teaching materials with reasonable cohesive features were selected to help students in the EC better understand the features of lexical repetition. 3. Pre-test and Post-test The pre-test and post-test were planned to compare the effects of the reading model. The reading paper of the pre-test was adapted from CET-4, December, 2009, and the reading paper of the post-test was adapted from CET 4, 2010, June to ensure the validity. Because the CET test is designed by Chinese language testing professionals, it has been proved to have reached international standards of educational assessment. The pre-test was used to measure the students' reading proficiency and comprehension to ensure that EC and CC were at the same level before the experiment. The post-test was administered after the experiment to determine how much progress students had made in their reading ability or performance through a certain period of reading teaching. 4 Procedure of the Experiment The experiment lasted one term. It was conducted during the regular class hour of intensive reading. The experiment was divided into two phases. During the preexperimental stage, the pre-test and their result analyses were carried out. In the EC the classroom instructions were given. 1. The First Phase At the beginning of the term, I carried out one time examination on the CET-4 reading test paper of December of 2009. The pre-test was designed to check whether or not students have the same level of English reading proficiency. Finally, because cohesion-based reading model is based on understanding of a text as a whole, the students in the EC had to learn to read at text level. The training of discourse construction was done in the EC. It lasted one semester. The students in the CC were instructed by the sentence-focused method, that is, sentences were explained explicitly and words were studied in details. 2. The Second Phase This is the classroom instruction stage. During the term study, the students in the CC continued their conventional teaching method, while the students in the EC were instructed by the cohesion-based reading model, which lasted about three months. The aim of the experiment was to make the students build their comprehension with the
436 M. Huang, Y. Song, and N. Li help of cohesive links. If the students learned the skills, they would easily and quickly form the main framework of a text and find topic-related words to help them better understand the text which they read. During this phase. the lexical devices were briefly introduced. The aim was to make students have the overall knowledge of cohesion to lay the foundation of the next task. Then the students were taught to identify simple and complex repetition, simple and complex paraphrase to practice The performance of lexical cohesion, to identify central and marginal sentencesÿrearrange disordered sentences with the help of cohesive devices, to determine bonds and links of repetition and to recognize topic-related vocabulary and fill in blanks with missing key words to determine topic-related words in a text. It was the key to the cohesion-based reading model. 3. The Third Phase At the end of this term, the post-test was conducted in the EC and the CC to check that the EC students have mastered the cohesion-focused method of reading and their reading ability has been greatly improved. The CC students have not been affected by this method. During this stage, the students in the EC had to learn some reading skills such as making inference, understanding the text as a whole, guessing words through lexical repetition and extracting the main information in macrostructure. Each of the summarization procedures was used to generate summaries based on the selection of highly-cohesive single sentences Then, post-test was designed to check whether or not students have improved their English reading ability. It began at the end of the second term. The CET-4 reading test paper of June,2010 was used. After this time experiment and through the comparison of the two time tests, we could find out that it is necessary to emphasize the reading teaching based on lexical cohesion, and it should combine the semantic meaning with expressing meaning, not just merely stress the forms of cohesion. 5 Data Collection There were four kinds of data needed in the study. The collection of relevant data was mainly about: Data collected from the pre-test on both the EC and CC students at the beginning of the term. This time test was to examin the two class students English reading level. And on the base of the same result in the test, we continued to carry out the experiment. This test includes three part reading comprehension the fast reading, reading in depth, intensive reading. And the total is 35 points. The table1 is the pretest score comparison of the two classes. Table 1. The score of the pre-test 30p 10p 25-29p 20-24p 15-19p 10-14p above below CC 0% 15% 33% 33% 15% 4% EC 0% 19% 30% 30% 17% 4%
A Study on the Application of Lexical Cohesion to ESL Reading 437 Data collected from the post-test on both the EC and CC students at the end of the term of the experiment. Through almost three months practicing in class. EC students received the cohesion-based reading teaching, and CC students got a traditional teaching practice. The table 2 is the post-test score comparison of the two classes. Table 2. The score of the post-test 30p above 25-29p 20-24p 15-19p 10-14p 10p below CC 6% 33% 33% 21% 6% 0% EC 11% 37% 38% 8% 2% 0% 6 The Result Analysis According to the comparison in the above charts, the two class students English reading ability is on the same level before the experiment. There are no 30 points above students, the 25 to 29 points students occupied 15 percent in CC and 20 percent in EC. The middle part of the two classes is between 15 to 24 points, the 10 points below students occupied 4 percent in CC and 4 percent in EC. And the average score in the CC is 19.5 points and in EC is also 19.5 points. But the post-test result shows us both the two class students English reading ability was improved. There are several 30 points above students, the 25 to 29 points students occupied 33 percent in CC and 37 percent in EC. The middle part of the two classes transferred from the pre-test s 15 to 24 point into now the 20 points to 29 points, it is a great increase in the high mark section. And this time there is no one zero in CC and EC. And the mean in the CC is 22.8 points and in EC is 24.9 points. The result of the test presents a fact that the experimental teaching method indeed changed students' reading method and contributed to the improvement of English reading ability in the EC. From another aspect, let s see the comparison from the portrait angle. The pre-test score and the post-test score within the CC and EC themselves. With the different teaching models in English reading class, through one term s practice, both the two classes have got improvement in the final test. In CC, 30 points above students increased 6 percent, the number of the between 25 to 29 points increased 18 percent, there is a little improvement in the band of 15 to 24 points, and the number of lower mark band reduced about 9 percent. And the important change is that the average mark of two times test increased 2.7 points. In EC, 30 points above students increased 11 percent, the number of the between 25 to 29 points increased 18 percent, it increased in number between the band of 20 to 24 points, there is a relatively more improvement in the band of 15 to 24 points, and the number of lower mark band reduced about 15 percent. And the important change in the average mark of two times test increased 4.6 points. Absolutely, from the contrast of the EC and CC in the post- test, we could draw to a conclusion that the students who received the cohesion-based teaching method have got a comparative improvement.
438 M. Huang, Y. Song, and N. Li 7 Conclusion Lexical cohesion, as an important factor in text, is prerequisite to cohere a number of sentences into a whole coherent one. It plays such an important role in keeping a text coherent that much emphasis ought to be given to it in the reading practice. Through pre-reading, while-reading, and post-reading activities, the students can actively make use of the reading strategies and skills to get a thorough comprehension of the text. With cohesion-analysis reading approach, the students can grasp comparatively fast the structure of the text, seize the theme and potential meaning of the text, identify the details and understand the writer's attitude and view, and thus improve their reading comprehension at both the sentence and text level, which are supposed to be the required reading abilities of English learners. Because of the limitations of time, materials and other resources and as well as the author s personal knowledge, it is unavoidable that some limitations exist in this thesis. So, the current study needs to be improved in the future. We have to pay more attention to this topic in study and classroom teaching. I really wish that the further observational research as well as the experiment could be carried out to search for the effection of the lexical cohesion model in reading comprehension and how the cohesive devices influence other activities, for instance, listening and writing. So it could present more implications for EFL teaching. References 1. Halliday, M.A.K., Hasan, R.: Cohesion in English. Foreign language Teaching and Research Press, Beijing (2001) 2. Hoey, M.: Patterns of Lexis in Text. Oxford University Press, Oxford (1991) 3. Carrell, P.L.: Cohesion is Not Coherence. TESOL Quarterly 16(4) (1982) 4. Carrell, P.L.: Facilitating ESL Reading by Teaching Text Structure. TESOL Quarterly (1985) 5. Dechant, E.: Understanding and Teaching Reading: An Interactive Model. Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale (1991) 6. Gutwinski, W.: Cohesion in Literary Texts. Mouton, The Hague (1976) 7. Halliday, M.A.K., Hasan, R.: Cohesion in English. Longman, London (1976) 8. Halliday, Hasan, R.: Language, Context and Text. Deskin University Press, Victoria (1984)