An Empirical Study On Discourse Cohesion Devices And Vocabulary Richness In English Composition Of Senior High School

Among the five language skills of listening,speaking,reading,viewing and writing proposed in the General High School English Curriculum Standards issued by the Ministry of Education in 2018,writing has always been the focus of English teaching in senior high school because of its strong comprehensiveness and large proportion in the English test of the National College Entrance Examination.In recent years,writing teaching has received a certain degree of attention.Many scholars and English teachers have used relevant theories in linguistics and second language acquisition to explore and innovate the methods of English writing teaching in senior high school,and also some of the problems that existed in English writing teaching were improved and resolved.Nevertheless,there are still some prominent problems in the teaching of English writing in senior high school.Through a review of relevant literatures,it is found that in the current senior high school English writing teaching,students mainly have prominent problems in discourse cohesion and vocabulary use.In the book Cohesion in English co-authored by Halliday and Hasan in 1976,the cohesive device conjunction is one of the effective and easy-to-apply cohesive devices in the cohesive category of grammatical cohesion.And according to the memes defined by Chinese scholars Li Jie,He Ziran and Huo Yongshou in 2011,in language,morphemes,words,phrases,sentences,texts,etc.,all those that can be copied and spread through imitation can be called memes.Accordingly,connectives contained in the cohesive device conjunction and words and phrases in senior high school English textbook are all memes.Based on this,this research combines memetics with senior high school English writing teaching for experimental research.Under the guidance of memetics,this research also combines the discourse cohesion theory.Starting from the current situation of the lack of discourse cohesion and the monotony of vocabulary use in senior high school students’ English compositions,this study establishes an English writing teaching mode of “listening,reading and speaking-to-write” that combines listening,reading,speaking and writing to answer the following two questions:1)What effect does the English writing teaching mode of “listening,reading and speaking-to-write” from the perspective of memetics have on improving the use of connectives in senior high school students’ compositions and the discourse cohesion of their compositions?2)What effect does the English writing teaching mode of “listening,reading and speaking-to-write” from the perspective of memetics have on improving the richness of topic-related vocabulary in senior high school students’ compositions?The research methods of this study include experimental methods and text analysis methods.During the experiment,on the one hand,this study used SPSS24.0 to conduct specific data analysis.On the other hand,this study also adopted text analysis method to analyze the connectives,discourse cohesion and topic-related vocabularies in the students’ pre-test and post-test compositions sentence by sentence.From the experimental results,the English writing teaching mode of “listening,reading and speaking-to-write” from the perspective of memetics can help senior high school students increase the use of connectives in their compositions and enhance the discourse cohesion of their compositions and can help students improve the richness of topic-related vocabulary in their compositions.