Discourse Cohesion Perspective:English Reading-to-write Teaching In Senior High School

Since the college entrance examination reform,writing on the new English exam has added an extra composition,and high school English textbook has fit the “reading for writing” part in.These fully prove the growing urgency of developing students’ writing ability.However,in the practical “reading-to-write” teaching,reading teaching pays more attention to vocabulary and syntax,ignoring the grasp of the cohesion of discourses,so it is still difficult for students to produce cohesive writing.The questionnaire issued by the author also finds that students lack cohesion knowledge and their writing is dissatisfying.Thus,this research attempts to carry out reading-to-write teaching from the perspective of discourse cohesion,and conducts a teaching experiment to verify whether this teaching method can improve students’ writing competence,and really enhance the cohesion of their compositions.This research firstly gives introductions to discourse cohesion,reading-to-write and their relevant research findings.Then,it presents the forms of grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion,and explains the strategies for developing cohesion awareness and implementing cohesive devices.Finally,in order to testify the effectiveness of discourse-cohesion-based teaching,two classes in a high school are selected to conduct a four-month teaching experiment,with the experimental class taught by cohesion-based reading-to-write and the control class taught by traditional reading-to-write teaching which ignores cohesion knowledge.This research adopts quantitative method and obtains experimental data through questionnaire and tests.Data analyses eventually show that reading-to-write teaching based on discourse cohesion can effectively improve students’ writing competence.It can also significantly improve students’ discourse cohesive ability.Particularly in the use of cohesive devices as lexical cohesion,reference and conjunction,students get much more proficient.This research is supposed to offer some implications to writing teaching in senior high schools.It can also consolidate learners’ functional linguistic knowledge to a certain extent.