The Application Of Cohesion Theory In Teaching Practical Writing To Vocational College English Majors

Cohesion, a crucial notion in text linguistics, plays an important role in English texts. However, cohesion has been neglected in English writing teaching in China for a long time. Researching in EFL writing reveals that lack of cohesion and coherence can be seen in most EFL students'compositions. The suggestion of applying cohesion theory in English writing teaching is raised. However, few people ever did any empirical researches.Previous relevant studies just made static analysis on the cohesive features of students'narrative, expository and argumentative writing. They neglected another practical style---practical writing. Moreover, during the subjects of their past studies, the vocational college students were seldom referred.Therefore, in view of the shortages of previous studies and particularity of vocational college, the author attempted to testify whether applying cohesion theory in practical writing teaching can improve students'practical writing quality, and find out the relationship between the use of cohesive devices and writing quality.In this thesis, the author first introduced the background, purpose and significance of the present study, and pointed out the weakness of previous studies. Then discussed the relationship between cohesion and coherence, and elaborated the Halliday and Hasans'(1976) taxonomy of cohesive devices. After a full discussion on the theoretical basis of the present study, the following hypotheses were put forward: (1) the teaching of cohesive devices can help students improve their writing performance; (2) good writing uses more cohesive devices than poor writing uses; (3) the use of conjunction and lexical devices is closely correlated with the quality of practical writing.Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to analyze the use of cohesive devices in practical compositions written by Chongqing Technology and Business Institute English major students. In this study, class one --- the experimental class (EG) and class two --- the control class (CG) were taught the same content except the EG adding cohesion teaching. Both classes adopted the process approach. They also did almost the same amount of exercise. The two groups finished seven papers (including the pretest and posttest). Moreover, the pretest and posttest in EG and CG were rated by two experienced teachers independently, who relied on the rating scale of writing in CET4. The author adopted Halliday and Hasans'(1976) taxonomy of cohesive devices as framework of the present study. And the SPSS 11.5 was used to do the calculations. The t-test showed that there was no significant difference between EG and CG in the pretest, but significant difference in the posttest. After that the author chose the posttest compositions of EG (30 papers in total) as samples, which were analyzed by the descriptive statistics, t-test and Pearson's correlation. The results displayed that good writing uses more cohesive devices than poor writing uses. Meanwhile, there was a positive correlation between the number of cohesive ties used and the quality of practical writing, and there was a negative correlation between the number of incorrect cohesive devices used and writing quality. In addition, among the sub-categories of cohesive devices, the use of conjunctive and lexical devices was closely correlated with the quality of practical writing.Results of the study confirmed the hypotheses and demonstrated that the EG's improvement could be attributed to the use of cohesive devices which reinforced the textual meaning and made the papers coherent. Thus, they could help the readers to interpret the papers easily and correctly.