The importance of coherence and cohesion to teaching of reading

Yuan+Xuefeng

Teachers are eager to let their students have the chance and the ability to read all verbal encounters of one individual. It could be written and printed words such as newspaper articles，letters，stories，recipes，instructions，notices，leaflets，journal articles，and textbooks and so on. These texts are coherent，meaningful communications in which the words and sentences are linked to one another in a form. Moreover，a fine written text must have coherence and cohesion. These two features are crucial for readers to recognize，because coherence and cohesion could help a reader to facilitate the interpretation of a text. Effective readers tend to take advantage of these features during reading process. It is worth to know how to use these features in a reading class.

Coherence in written discourse

Coherence is the feeling that a text hangs together，that it makes sense，and is not just a jumble of sentences （Neubauer，1983）. It is also “a quality that makes a text conforms to a consistent world view based on ones experience and culture or convention” （Celce-Murcia & Ohlstain，2000，p.125）. Coherence could represent ideas and proposition in a text. It fits the writers intention and relates to the discourse world of a written text，such as pragmatic features，a content area. It is a kind of interaction between readers and writers. A text need to make sense to the reader in order to be coherent. The presentations of coherence in written text are often through the use of deictic，anaphoric，cataphoric or tense structure which logically reflects in a text. This is the presentation through syntactical features. It also could behave through presupposition and implications which connected to general world knowledge. It could be explained that coherence could be achieve through the writer and the readers shared knowledge or schemata. Due to this reason，the evaluation and the judgment of one written text may vary from one to one. Additionally，coherence could be an interaction between readers and writers. Widdowson （1984，p.77） claims that the reader should understand the illocutionary intention of the writer.

After considering the features of coherence，teachers could realize the importance of coherence while students act as a reader. As mentioned above，coherence is an interaction between a reader and a writer. The shared knowledge of both readers and writers could influence the understanding of one written discourse. Therefore，it is significant to teach coherence when teaching of reading. Koda （2005，p.127） suggested that “the reader must understand the specific ways coherence relations among text”. In the interactive approach，coherence is both text-based and reader centered. The reader needs to match the schemata of context and form written by the writer in the text with their own schemata and their own view of the world and of the subject area or content which presented in the text.endprint

Cohesion in written discourse

Halliday and Hasan （1976，p.18） defined cohesion as “the set of possibilities that exist in the language for making text hang together：the potential that the speaker or writer has at his disposal”. Cohesion is the study of the relations within a text. Additionally，cohesion is a set of semantic resources for linking a sentence with what has gone before. According to the differences between different ties，Halliday and Hasan classified grammatical cohesion into five categories. They are reference，substitution，ellipsis，conjunction，and lexical cohesion. It is important to use grammatical cohesion in reading process. Take reference as an example，two kinds of reference which are significant in constructing cohesion. One is cataphoric which refers to forward referencing and anaphoric which refers to backward referencing within the text. Another is exophoric which refers to context outside the text. The former facilitates bottom-up processing. The later one plays an important role in the top-down processing.

Lexical cohesion is the cohesive functions in texts are expressed by the selection of vocabulary. Lexical cohesion is generally known as two different types. One is reiteration which involves the repetition of one lexical item. A general word refers back to a lexical item，and the use of a synonym，a near-synonym and a superordinate of a lexical item （Halliday & Hasan，1976，p.278）. Another type of lexical cohesion is called collocation which is achieved through connected lexical items that regularly co-occur in similar context. In other words，it is the associated words which share the same lexical environment. Teaching implications of coherence and cohesion

After the consideration of the importance of coherence and cohesion in texts，teachers are supposed to teach students how to recognize these two features. One of the ways to acknowledge them is offering students a well-written text and a text without coherence. This may help them to know how to make the text well organized and meaningful. This activity could help students recognize the cohesive devices，and help them to interact with reading texts. Another activity which could help students to be an effective reader is that give them a text which randomly organized，and then let the students find the right order to make a text meaningful. They may also accumulate the conventional knowledge during these activities，and this could help readers to raise the awareness of how to use coherence and cohesion features to help them to read effectively.

References：

[1]Celce-Murcia，C.& Olshtain.E.（2000）.Discourse and context in language teaching：A guide for language teachers.New York： Cambridge University Press.

[2]Halliday，K.& Hasan，R.（1976）.Cohesion in English.London： Longman.

[3]Koda，K.（2005）.Insights into second language reading.New York：Cambridge University Press.

[4]Neubauer，F.（1983）.Coherence in natural language texts.Hamburg：Helmut Buske Verlag.

[5]Widdowson，G.（1984）.Explorations in applied linguistic 2. Oxford：OUP.endprint