A Study On The Application Of Textual Cohesive Devices To English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

English writing as an elementary technique in English study,receives amounts of attention.Although the significance of English writing is laid much stress by the teachers,the competence of students’English writing does not promote as expectation.For years’researches,some experts find that most of the teachers regard compositions as combinations of many sentences,so the teachers attach much significance to the accurate application of vocabularies and grammars in teaching writing,while neglecting the writing as a whole text that should be cohesive and coherent,which leads to the fact that students’writing ability could not improve evidently.A text belongs to a relatively closed world,which requires internal texture and context to get the information together tightly.Cohesion refers to the way in which the components of a text are linked together inseparably with textual cohesive devices,showing the logicality of a text in a surface way.With it,readers can attain the semantic relationship between the sentences and follow the ideas that the writer wants to convey.So on the basis of the cohesion theory of Halliday&Hasan,this study attempts to explore the effects of teaching cohesive devices on the cohesion of students’writing,for the sake of cultivating the consciousness of cohesion among students and helping teachers to realize the significance of cohesion in writing.The following questions will be solved out in this study.1)What’s the present statue of textual cohesive devices employed by the learners in senior high school?2)What textual cohesive devices are mostly employed by senior high school learners in their writing?3)How to promote the capability of cohesion in English writing among the students in senior high school?In this study,106 students were chosen from two average classes in a senior high school in Shantou,Guangdong Province as the study subjects and one of the class served as experimental class was taught cohesion devices from September 5^thto December 26^th.Questionnaire,interviews of teachers and students and tests before and after the experiment would be utilized to collected data.The SPSS 24.0 was used to analyze and deal with the data.The findings of the research are listed as follows.1)The cohesive devices used in students seems unsatisfactory in the current situation.Firstly,students are short of the consciousness and instructions of employing cohesive devices in their compositions.Besides,learners could apply simple reference and conjunction in their writing but have no idea with substitution,ellipsis and synonym.2)Reference,lexical cohesion and conjunction are the most widely used cohesive devices in students compositions and they are in descending order.Moreover,not all the students use the same cohesive device constantly to make the texts fluently.3)By systematically teaching cohesive devices and giving effective feedback in writing,students can use cohesive devices appropriately and reasonably,which will promote their cohesion ability in writing.At the same time,from the results of student’writing,it shows the improvement of the capability of cohesive devices do have the positive influence on the students’English writing achievement.After the research,to better help the teaching of cohesive devices,the following suggestions are listed to teachers.First of all,teachers should intentionally emphasis and instruct the employment of cohesive devices in everyday’teaching to increase the learners’corresponding knowledge.Secondly,it would be better if teachers create entertaining context to assist students in forming cohesive chains.Last but not least,effective feedback should be provided for students to direct the application of cohesive devices in writing.