Prior knowledge of Cohesion Factors and their Effect on Reading Comprehension of English Texts in Pre-university Students

The concept of cohesion is a semantic one; it refers to the relations of meaning that exist within the text, and that define it as a text. In order to interpret a text it is necessary to find out these relations. In this study, the effect of cohesion factors on the reading comprehension of students in pre- university English book was studied. The cohesion factors on the reading texts of English pre-university book were determined according to the cohesion in English by Halliday and Hasan (1976). 110 students were chosen in Sari, Iran. Half was as experimental group and half as control one. A pre-test was given to experimental and control groups. After 8 weeks training of cohesion factors to experimental group, a post test was given to experimental and control group again. The results were recorded and analyzed by a computer program, SPSS. Paired t-test and Independent sample test were used in analyzing the results, too. Results showed that different kinds of cohesion ties were used in pre-university English book. So the book is cohesive. Among the cohesive ties, the referent had the most frequency(65.2%) and the substitution had the least one(0.6%). Among the referents, personal referent had the most frequency (52.1%) and comparative had the least (0.6%). The use of conjunction varied between 25% and 43%. In lexical cohesion, repetition was the most. Statistics results indicated that in pre-test there was not a significant difference between experimental and control groups (P value= 0.369). However, after the instruction to experimental group and giving the post test to experimental and control groups, the difference was significant (P value<0.001). A paired t-test was applied to compare pre-test and post test in each group. For experimental group P value<0.001 and for control group it was 0.002. So the difference was significant in both groups. Considering the difference between means at the pre-test and post test stages in experimental group (7.06) and in control group (2.39), it can be said that although both groups showed a significant difference, the experimental one improved much better in the reading comprehension ability after receiving instruction on the cohesion factors. This study showed the effect of cohesion factors in reading comprehension, although it was not the only factor.

Keywords:

Discourse analysis , Reading comprehension , Cohesion factors , English texts