The Application Of Cohesion And Coherence Theory To Senior Middle School English Writing Teaching

Writing is a creative activity,and it is one of the four basic skills of English.English writing plays an important part in senior high school English learning.However,it can also be found in actual English writing that although students have mastered a certain amount of English vocabulary,they cannot write satisfactory compositions in a native way.Problems and mistakes can be found in students’writings which include ambiguous reference of pronouns,incoherence between paragraphs or in general,etc.In traditional English writing teaching,these problems are what teachers and students often ignore.Since the book Cohesion in English written by Halliday and Hasan(1976)was published,cohesion and coherence theory has attracted the attention of linguistics at home and abroad.This theory was then applied into English language teaching and learning.Applying cohesion and coherence theory to English writing teaching can not only be increase students cohesive and coherent awareness,but also enable them to have a better and clear understanding of what good English articles look like and how to make their articles cohesive and coherent.In this way,the author intends to apply cohesion and coherence theory to senior high school English writing teaching.The present study aims to explore three questions,and they are:(1)What effects does the cohesion and coherence theory-based English writing teaching model has on grammatical cohesion of senior high school students’ writing?(2)What effects does the cohesion and coherence theory-based English writing teaching model has on lexical cohesion of senior high school students’ writing?(3)What effects does the cohesion and coherence theory-based English writing teaching model has on the discourse semantics of senior high school students’ writing?The present study involves two classes students in grade two of senior high school.There are ninety students in total.One class is set randomly as the experimental class(EC),and the other is the control class(CC).The experiment lasts for twelve weeks.The results of the pretest in EC and CC show that the English writing proficiency in these two classes is quite close.Cohesion and coherence theory-based English writing teaching model is conducted in EC,while students in CC attend English writing class as usual,where traditional writing teaching model is adopted.After the teaching experiment,posttest and post-questionnaire are conducted immediately in these two classes,and the data collected is then analyzed.It is found that:in the pretest,the problem of deficiency of grammatical cohesive devices is obvious,which causes the sentences to be not cohesive and the articles to be lengthy.In the meantime,the form of conjunction is monotonous.After the teaching experiment,the usage frequency of grammatical cohesive devices increase apparently,and the problems of deficiency and monotonous form have reduced.In lexical cohesion,the problem of deficiency in reiteration and collocation is found in students’ pretest compositions.Besides,the form of reiteration is monotonous.After the teaching experiment,the usage frequency of reiteration and collocation increase apparently,and the variety in the form of reiteration is improved.In the aspect of discourse coherence,problems like incoherence in overall structure,semantic irrelevance between paragraphs and sentences are found in students’ pretest compositions.After the teaching experiment,the mean values of LSA sentence all,LSA paragraph and LSA sentence adjacent of EC students’ compositions have all increased significantly,which indicates that there are improvements in the overall and partial coherence of students’ writings.The results of questionnaire and interview show that the awareness of grammatical cohesion,lexical cohesion,overall and partial coherence have all raised for EC students after the teaching experiment.The implications of this research are:(1)cohesion and coherence theory-based English writing teaching model is conducive to improve students’ writing proficiency;(2)English teachers need to pay emphasis on improving the overall and partial coherence of students’ writings;(3)timely and detailed feedback from peers or teachers contributes to the improvement of students’ English writing.