An Applied Research Of Textual Cohesion Theory Of English Writing In Senior Middle School

Writing is perceived as a significant criteria in English that can evaluate whether students have the ability of learning and using English proficiently,and writing skills accurately reflect the capacity of thinking. The students know how to express ideas and deliver information with their own grasped English knowledge in the examinations. In China, writing is a key part in English teaching, which plays a significant role in College Entrance Examination. It is still a burning question that how to enhance the student’s writing skill effectively in English teaching. At present, there are so many difficulties in teaching of writing. On the one hand, teachers are lack of usage of systematic cohesion theory in their teaching. Besides, they pay less attention to the cohesion devices in students’ compositions. On the other hand, students focus on the grammar instead of the text, laying emphasis on vocabularies than textual cohesion. The research is aimed to improve students’ writing skill and readability, hoping that students can make great progress in English writing after mastering the cohesion theory.Cohesion in English(1976) co-authored by Halliday and Hasan is a symbol of the establishment of textual cohesion theory. Since then, a great number of experts and scholars from abroad and home have studied the cohesion theory in detail. Thanks for that, they have pushed the theory ahead greatly. However, some of researchers have shortages in their studies that they failed to connect the cohesion theory with English writing and adopt the methodology of experiment in teaching how to write.The research is based on the related researches on the application of cohesion theory in the teaching of English writing. After the full discussion on the theoretical basis of the present studies which are from home and abroad,the hypothesis was proposed that the teaching of cohesion theory can help to improve the scores in English writing. With the purpose of exploring the current situation of cohesion theory in teaching of English writing, the author made a questionnaire investigation for the students in grade 1 in a senior high school in Chongqing city. According to the experimental results in pre-test and post-test, the author holds that the teaching of cohesion theory is a good way to improve the students’ English writing competence. In the study, the experimental class(Class9,grade1)and control class( Class10,grade10) were taught the same contents except that the experimental class adopts the cohesion theory when learns writing. They also finished the same number of writing exercise based on the same topic. Moreover, the writing paper(including pre-test and post-test) in experimental class and control class were rated by veteran and experienced teachers in the school, who depended upon the rating scale of writing in NCEE. The result showed that there were no significant differences in pre-test between these two classes. However, in experimental class, the students’ writing score’s much higher than control class.In the end of this paper, the author draws a conclusion from the experimental result that it would be conducive to enhance their English writing competence when the students learn more textual cohesion and cohesion theory in class. The author, in the meanwhile, puts forward some suggestion and illustrates the limitation and deficiency of this research.