A Study On The Application Of Discourse Cohesion And Coherence Theory To Continuation Writing Teaching In Senior High School

With the promotion of new reform in the National College Entrance Examination,continuation writing is gradually being used nationwide as a new writing test item to evaluate students’ reading and writing ability.This kind of writing requires high control ability of discourse structure.How to effectively improve continuation writing ability is still in the exploratory stage.This study adopts the mixed research method combining qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis to conduct a 16-week research.A total of 94 students from two classes(the experimental class & the control class)of Grade Two in an ordinary senior high school in Guangdong Province are selected as the research participants.The discourse cohesion and coherence theory is applied to continuation writing teaching in the experimental class,while the product approach which refers to learning and imitating model essays is adopted in the control class.The study is to verify whether the students in the experimental class have higher scores in continuation writing than the students in the control class through the comparison of the pre-test and post-test.A questionnaire survey is conducted among the students in the two classes to know about the students’ understanding and application of discourse cohesion and coherence theory before the experiment.Then,it makes comparative texts analysis on all the compositions of the two tests in the two classes from two angles,namely,the number of cohesive devices and the degree of context cohesive,to learn about the changes in the application of cohesion and coherence theory before and after the experiment.Finally,in order to further support the questionnaire results,tests results and texts analysis results,six students with varying degrees of improvement in post-test scores in the experimental class are selected to have in-depth interviews on the effects of the experiment,learning difficulties and problems existing in the experiment.The research results are shown as follows.Firstly,after the application of discourse cohesion and coherence theory to the teaching of continuation writing,the students’ consciousness of discourse cohesion has been distinctly strengthened.The students in the experimental class would pay attention to the cohesion between sentences,paragraphs and contents during the writing process.Secondly,after the teaching experiment,discourse coherence of the students’ continuation writings has been improved significantly.In the post-test,the number of cohesive devices and the degree of context cohesive in the compositions of the students in the experimental class are higher than those in the control class,which makes discourse coherence of their compositions enhanced,thus their writing quality has also been improved.Thirdly,after the application of discourse cohesion and coherence theory to the teaching of continuation writing,students’ continuation writing ability has been improved to a certain extent.The students in the experimental class are able to use the cohesive devices that they have learned,namely,reference,substitution,ellipsis,conjunction,lexical cohesion and context cohesion,and the increasing range of the average score of the experimental class is markedly larger than that of the control class,which proves that the application of discourse cohesion and coherence theory in continuation writing teaching can effectively enhance the students’ ability of discourse cohesion and continuation writing.