Study On The Cohesion And Coherence Of College English Teachers’ Discourse In Classroom

College English class, a compulsory course of higher education in China, is mainly carried out by teachers in the classroom, so English instruction is implemented in classroom setting. English teacher’s discourse is, to a great extent, the major source of the comprehensible target language input for English learners in China, especially for the beginners. Teacher’s discourse in English classes serves as not only the object of the course, but also the medium to achieve the object. Therefore, it is necessary to make an investigation into teacher’s discourse to improve English instruction and English teachers’professional development. Recently, although there have been a lot of studies on teacher’s discourse, researches on the cohesion and coherence of teacher’s discourse are not paid enough attention to. Because of the above-mentioned reasons, this thesis will do research on the cohesion and coherence of teacher’s discourse.Eight college English teachers who won the first prize or second prize in the Second SFLEP National College English Teaching Contest are chosen to be the objects of the study, four of whom from the integrated curriculum group and another four from the listening and speaking group. By transcribing the videos, the author analyzed the similarities and differences of the transcriptions of the teacher’s discourse of these excellent teachers.The theoretical background of this study is Halliday’s Cohesion Theory, four parts involved:reference, ellipsis&substitution, conjunction, lexical cohesion. This thesis analyzes the transcriptions of the teacher’s discourse from these four points and thus gets some important data. From the data analysis, we find the teacher’s discourse is cohesive and coherent. Besides analyzing the common features of the eight excellent English teachers, this thesis also studies on comparisons between the transcription of the teacher’s discourse who won the first prize and the ones of other teachers for the purpose of giving some suggestions to college English teachers on how to improve the cohesion and coherence of their own talks.This paper is divided into five chapters. The first chapter is about the purpose and significance of the study, the research questions and the organization. Chapter two is about the literature review. Chapter three is the theoretical basis of the study, which includes Halliday’s Cohesion Theory. Chapter four is the main part of the whole thesis, which is about the purpose of the empirical study, the subjects of the study, the method and the results. Chapter five is the conclusion of the whole thesis, including the findings. the pedagogical implications, the limitations and the suggestions. From the analysis of the transcriptions of the teacher’s discourse, this thesis finds some common features of these eight excellent teachers and the special features of the teacher who won the first prize. The results of the study are as follows:1. Most of the teachers use a lot of referential pronouns and indicative pronouns, but few of them use comparative pronouns. The use of these referential pronouns makes their talks cohesive and coherent.2. Ellipsis and substitution are used frequently in the talks. They usually use "one, so, do", from which "one" is used the most frequently. If teachers use ellipsis and substitution, they can make the talks coherent and correct.3. The four kinds of connection are achieved by connection words, adverbs and phrases to make the talks cohesive and colorful. These teachers use lots of these connections to make the discourse coherent.4. Repetition and synonym are used more than the other kinds of reiteration and most teachers can use collocation correctly. The use of repetition can serve both as a way to connect the registers and a positive feedback; the use of synonym can make the talks colorful; the correct use of collocation can help teachers express their opinions well and provide an input to the students.5. As referential pronouns, the teachers from the listening and speaking group used more than those from the integrated curriculum group. However, for comparative pronouns, the teachers from the integrated curriculum group used more. So when teaching different kinds of classed, the teacher should pay special attention to the use of different referential pronouns to make their talks coherent.By comparing the transcription of the talks between Jin Qi and other teachers, we can come to the conclusions as follows:1. Jin Qi who won the first prize in the integrated curriculum group used both other kinds of pronouns and comparative pronouns to make his talk cohesive, correct and colorful.2. Most teachers just used "one", but Jin Qi used different kinds of the substitution such as "do, so" to make his talks colorful.From the above analysis, some suggestions are put forward as follows:1. College English teacher should use different kinds of pronouns to make their talks colorful and cohesive.2. When using substitution, do not just use "one" and try to utilize other kinds of substitution such as "so, do".3. Make good use of different connections 4. Teachers who teach listening and speaking should pay attention to the right way to the use of referential pronouns.5. Teachers can use repetition as a kind a feedback and synonym to make the language rich and cohesive.