The Effects Of Reading-to-Write On Junior High School Students’ English Writing Based On Textual Cohesion

This study was undertaken to investigate the effects of reading-to-write on junior high school students’English writing based on textual cohesion.The theoretical bases of the study are discourse cohesion theory,input and output theory.The significance of this study is to better traditional writing teaching and further improve the quality of students’ writing.The research questions to be addressed in this study are as follows:1.What are the effects of reading-to-write on the grammatical cohesion of junior high school students’ English writing based on textual cohesion?(reference,substitution,ellipsis and conjunction)2.What are the effects of reading-to-write on the lexical cohesion of junior high school students’ English writing based on textual cohesion?(repetition and collocation)The participants in this study were 80 students in a junior high school in Zhenjiang,with 40 students in EC and 40 students in CC.The instruments of this study were two writing tests and an interview.After the experiment,six students were randomly selected from the experimental class.This interview was to investigate students’ attitudes and views on the effects of reading-to-write based on textual cohesion theory.Before and after the experiment,writing tasks were given,which would be served as pre-test and post-test in this research.Data analysis involved double scoring,calculation and comparison.All the compositions of the two tests were scored by senior teachers according to the writing scoring standard of the middle school entrance examination.The data was used to calculate and compare the frequency of grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion through independent sample t-test and paired sample t-test.The major findings from this study are as follows:Firstly,reading-to-write based on textual cohesion has positive effects on students’ grammatical cohesion which is composed of reference and conjunction,but has little effect on the cohesion of substitution and ellipsis.To be more specific,the sig value of reference is 0.015 and that of conjunction is 0.038,so this method has significant effects on reference and conjunction.By means of learning knowledge about grammatical cohesion,students have become more willing to use conjunction rather than reference to improve sentence complexity as well as the overall level of the article.However,the sig value of substitution is 0.057 and that of ellipsis is 0.162.Students use substitution and ellipsis less frequently at this stage for the lack of training and learning on them,and thus the experiment exerts no significant impact on substitution and ellipsis cohesion.Secondly,reading-to-write based on textual cohesion has positive effects on students’ lexical cohesion which is composed of repetition and collocation.The sig value of repetition is 0.005 and that of collocation is 0.002,so this method has significant effects on repetition and collocation.Through the study of lexical cohesion,students can reduce the repetition frequency of simple words,improve the richness of phrase collocation,enrich the connotation and highlight the literary grace.Adding lexical cohesion in the process of text input enables students to deepen their memory of relevant collocations based on understanding the meaning of words.It can make students flexibly use it in writing after expanding their vocabulary and corpus.This study provides some implications.Firstly,teachers need to play the role of reading text and integrate relevant knowledge of grammatical cohesion into writing teaching,which can help students understand how to use reference and conjunction in specific situations.Secondly,teachers should also add the knowledge of lexical cohesion in the teaching of reading-to-write to further expand students’ language input content,so as to reduce the use of repetitive words in writing,increase the variety of lexical collocation,and improve the ability of language output.This study has four limitations.First,the number of research objects is not large enough to fully reflect the impact of the teaching model on all students.Second,the research time is short,so some teaching effects may not be reflected.Third,there may be some errors in data processing due to the subjective factors of grading teachers.Forth,the subjects may be influenced by their physical and mental state during the writing process.