The Application Of Cohesion Theory In Teaching College English Writing

In 1976, Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan published their book Cohesion in English. Since then, cohesion and coherence became two important concepts which attract more and more attention of linguists. Meanwhile, cohesion theory was introduced to China and was also attracted attention of domestic scholars.English writing is one of the basic skills of English_teaching which is an integral part of foreign language teaching. During the English writing teaching, how to make a passage to be coherent, to use cohesion devices properly is the key point. However, the main problem of many students in English writing is that they cannot use cohesion devices correctly, furthermore, their English writing ability should be improved by all means.The main purpose of the study is to explore the relationship between the application of cohesion theory and the quality of college English writing, and how cohesion devices affect English writing on the other aspects, such as grammar, vocabulary, etc. Through designing the relevant experiments, we analyze the influence on college English writing by teaching cohesion devices. Meanwhile, by analyzing the reason why students using cohesion devices incorrectly to put forward the proposals for English writing teaching.This article analyzes the influence on the students'English writing by teaching cohesion devices through quantitative and qualitative methods. In this research, the subjects are the students of Shenyang medical college whose majors are clinical medicine. This study is designed to answer the following questions:(1) Whether the cohesion devices training on students can improve their writing quality; (2) The influence of English writing by application of cohesion devices including content, grammar, vocabulary and technical details is positive or negative; (3) In college English writing, what are the errors of students' using cohesion devices and its reasons. Teaching contents are totally the same expect the students of EG learn cohesion theory in addition. As far as the quantity of exercises is concerned, they are same, too. Each class complete seven compositions (includes the pretest and posttest). The compositions of pretest and posttest are rated by two experienced teacher according to the writing criterion of CET-4.After a term's experiment, the result of test shows that before the experiment, the students of both EG and CG cannot use cohesion devices properly in their writing. However, the two groups show obvious differences after the experiment:students of EG which have been trained by the exercises of cohesion devices perform better on writing logic and coherence than those of CG. At the same time, the result of test indicates that cohesion devices teaching also has a positive effect on other aspects of writing.In short, English writing teaching should change its status quo that teaching and training of cohesion devices are often neglected, and it is quite feasible to apply the cohesion theory to English teaching practice.