The Application Of Teaching Mode Based On Cohesion And Coherence Theory To English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

In English learning,writing is perceived as an essential factor that can evaluate whether students are capable of learning and using English proficiently.It can accurately reflect students’ ability of expressing and thinking by examining how students express thoughts and convey information with their grasped English knowledge.In China,writing is an important part in English teaching,and holds a significant position in college entrance examination.Hence,it becomes a burning question on how to enhance the students’ writing capability in senior high school English teaching.During the research,the author found that there were many difficulties in teaching of writing.On the one hand,teachers lacked instruction of systematic cohesion and coherence of discourse in their teaching.Besides,they paid less attention to the cohesive devices in students’ compositions.On the other hand,students focused more on the grammar and the vocabulary compared with textual cohesion.Therefore,the research is aimed to enhance the cohesion and coherence of students’ compositions through the writing teaching mode based on cohesion and coherence theory.The publication of Cohesion in English,a book co-authored by Halliday and Hasan in 1976,marked the establishment of cohesion theory.From then on,more linguists abroad and at home began to study the cohesion theory in detail,and cohesion theory,thus,obtained great development.But there were still shortages when it came to combing the cohesion and coherence theory with the writing teaching and adopting the methodology of experiment.So the author decided to give students training based on cohesion and coherence theory.The thesis was conducted on the basis of three questions: 1.What is the current situation of the use of cohesion and coherence theory in English writing of senior high school? 2.Can students’ awareness of cohesion and coherence be improved by the writing teaching based on cohesion and coherence theory? 3.Can students’ English writing level be enhanced by writing training based on cohesion and coherence theory?The study adopted literature analysis method,experimental method,questionnaire survey and comparative approach.The author selected two parallel classes in Kaifeng No.17 Senior High School as the experimental subjects.The teaching experiment was conducted for three months from September to November.Class One served as the experimental class,which adopted the cohesion and coherence instruction in the writing teaching.While Class Two was the control class which still followed the former teaching method.Before the experiment,the author had a pre-questionnaire to check out students’ use condition of cohesion and coherence theory in their compositions.To make sure the validity of the experiment,there was a pre-writing test in the experiment class and control class.Students in control class still adopted the traditional teaching way.After three months’ writing teaching,the author gave a post-questionnaire to the students in the experimental class and gave the post-writing tests to the students in both two classes.The collected data were analyzed by software SPSS20.0.The results showed that: most of the senior high school students failed to pay attention to the cohesion and coherence in their writing.Cohesion and coherence had not been given due attention in senior high school writing teaching,and students hardly had any relevant knowledge about cohesion and coherence theory.Through three months of training based on cohesion and coherence theory,students’ awareness of cohesion and coherence had been greatly improved and their writing level had been improved correspondingly.So the theory has its practical and theoretical value and can be broadly used in English writing teaching.