search. Firstly, students in junior high school need necessary theoretical instructions. The researcher finds that many students do not have good reading habits and they fail to develop a system of reading strategies. Moreover, because they can not grasp the main idea of a text and the relationship between sentences, they can not perceive the text correctly. Cohesion theory, the theoretical basis of the current study, covers a field of linguistics, providing students with knowledge of cohesion devices and aids them to understand texts better. Secondly, findings on cohesion theory concerning reading teaching in junior high school are rare and most of which choose the senior high school students or college students as the participants. This thesis may fill the gap that no actual empirical results have been found in students of junior high school level and add new insight to further research.
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CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Cohesion
In the field of applied linguistics, the concern in recent years mostly is the essential characteristics of text. One important aspect of texture is cohesion. The term ‘cohesion’ is used to refer to the property of connectedness that characterizes a text in contrast to a mere sequence of words. Cohesion should play an important role in English language teaching, as readers and writers need to be aware of the links that hold chunks of text together and that contribute to the creation of a text as a unit of meaning. Cohesion can contribute to the readability of a text and have an impact on the comprehensibility and clarity of the argument. Additionally, the way in which links between textual chunks are signalled reflects genre-specific properties of texts. Thus, an appropriate recognition and use of cohesive devices are essential for language learners to develop a native-like competence of text reception and production. However, the teaching of cohesion does not seem to be a straightforward issue. The present study aims to highlight this part of teaching reading, hoping to find out some enlightening results in this area.
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2.2 English Reading Teaching
The following part narrates some notions of reading, the relationship between reading and cohesion, as well as some current studies in this area. Reading has always been a topic in language teaching. It is so far the most important of the four skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing) in second language learning, particularly in English as a foreign language. The nature of reading has been defined variously by many linguists in history. According to Larry A. Harris and B. Smith(1979), reading is not only about understanding the literal meaning of the language but also about appreciating the underlying thoughts and feelings between the lines. So they describe reading as “the intellectual and emotional perception of a printed message.”(1979, &
