APPLYING COHESION THEORY TO TEACH READING COMPREHENSION TO FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNERS

Abstract

This paper investigated the impact of cohesion teaching on students’ reading comprehension. In order to achieve the goal, two key objectives were set for the study. Firstly, it was anticipated that the study would shed light on students' prior understanding of cohesiveness and cohesion in reading. Secondly, the researcher expected to find out whether the teaching of cohesiveness to students could help them become better readers. Therefore, an action research was conducted to accomplish the aim. To carry out this study, both quantitative and qualitative methods were employed with two questionnaires, a pre-test, a post-test, field notes and observation of the experimental group. The overall result showed that the intervention had a significant positive impact on the experimental group's reading ability. After the experimental teaching phase about cohesion, the students’ scores in the reading test improved remarkably compared with the scores in the test they did before. Despite the limited understanding of cohesion in reading, all the students admitted that cohesive devices played a crucial role in a written passage and it was necessary to learn about cohesive devices while practising reading skills.