Teaching Coherence Through Reading: A Way To Improve Students' Writing

Teachers normally focus a lot on the syntactical errors of the students' writing. Yet, even without grammatical errors, an essay may still be disorganized due to a lack of coherence. Instead of marking and correcting an essay every time when it is not coherent, it is more productive and effective to help students understand the concept of writing coherently before they are asked to write an essay.In this paper, following a comprehensive review of the notion of "coherence", students' writings are studied and analyzed fully when there are problems concerning coherence identified. A survey has been done among teachers to see the status quo of writing classes. Due to the fact that problems of coherence in students' writings and teachers' comparatively less efforts in teaching coherence co-exist, the relationship between reading and writing is explored and considered as a basis for suggestions regarding teaching strategies and methodology to help improve students' writing skills. An experiment has been conducted to see the effect of the chosen teaching strategies. And the results show that students make improvements in writing compositions from the perspective of coherence. They know they should focus on one topic instead of several in one paragraph and organize the sentences according to the rule of information distribution as the text unfolds. Students' feedbacks reflect their opinions about the role of teaching coherence in improving the students' writing.