A Study Of Text Linguistics And Its Application In College English Writing Teaching

One of the most important tasks of English teaching is to develop their English writing ability. With the deep-going of "Reform and Open" policy, with the coming of information society, English plays an increasingly obvious role in people's life, and the occasions on which English is used are also increasing. With the expanding of international communication and corporation, China gets contact with other countries more frequently. Both the country and the society put forward a much urgent requirement of application ability of English toward college students. The importance of writing ability is more and more obvious, being seen as basic for college students. In order to adapt the society, to cultivate talents, college English teaching must enhance writing teaching.Writing is kind of language production, which can mostly indicate comprehensive ability of using language. Writing also requires learners having a good command of vocabulary, grammar and language organization with strong imagination and logic-thinking. Based on the circumstances, the author suggests studying text linguistics and applying theory of text linguistics in college English writing teaching.This thesis firstly gives a brief description about text linguistics, and a detailed description of two most important concepts:cohesion and coherence. Then, Michael McCarthy and Ronald Carter's (1991) view of language, which is "language as discourse", together with the effect of text linguistics, is stated. Besides, the frameworks of Halliday and Hasan, Hu Zhuanglin, Zhang Delu and Liu Rushan are discussed respectively. Through the analysis of students' composition and sample texts from CET-4, the author finds there are big differences among their use of cohesion mechanism and coherence devices. The author also designs an experiment to look into the application of cohesion and coherence in college English teaching. By grouping, the teacher is asked to try teaching cohesion theory systematically, error correcting, and practicing writing to improve students writing ability. Data from questionnaires and the experiment are collected and analyzed by SPSS Inc. The result says that the experiment class is better than the control class. At last, the author suggests that English teachers should teach text linguistics to improve students'writing ability. With certain reasons, this study also has limitations and the author gives suggestions for future researches. This experimental study does have practical implications in college English writing teaching and improving students'writing ability.