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Abstract Halliday and Hasan identified five cohesive devices: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. Among these, reference, substitution, and ellipsis are mainly embodied in surface structures of texts. It is worth exploring whether instructions in surface structures of cohesive devices have an beneficial effect on school children's reading comprehension.
This study aims to review Chinese language textbooks catering to elementary school students and explore the distribution of cohesive devices , including reference, substitution and omission, which constitute surface structures of a text and are often tested in semantic quizzes to check students' reading comprehension. To deepen students' reading comprehension, the research reviewed Hang Lin edition of Chinese language textbooks for third and fourth graders, and analyzed the overall distribution of cohesive devices through various text types from the textbooks.
The findings showed that ellipsis was the most widely distributed, reference fell somewhere in between, and substitution was the least used. Among these cohesive devices, nominal ellipsis was the most frequently used and involved the lowest degree of complexity, while verbal substitution was least used and involved the highest degree of complexity. The study adopted Prof. Dengshou Xin's frequency count method for measuring text complexity, analyzed the error types of cohesive devices committed by students on campus, and therefore put forth a teaching sequence. After different cohesive devices were listed from most to least common, we found that nominal ellipsis with the lowest degree of complexity was the most widely distributed and the most frequently used, followed by personal reference and verbal substitution in order of frequency. The error rate of cohesive devices after instructions was very low, mostly zero, which suggested that instructions on cohesive devices contribute to the improvement of reading comprehension. Teachers can benefit from the results of the research when instructing cohesive devices and guiding students to practice so as to deepen students' surface structure knowledge and facilitate their reading comprehension.
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