Discourse Connectives As A Learning Task In Textbook-Writing

This paper proposes that the discourse connectives should be an importantlearning task in college English textbook-writing. There are two major reasons tosupport this claim. First, according to Halliday's cohesion theory, the connectives signalthe logic relationships between the propositions in lines and thus enable the reader toeffectively figure out the complex logic relations in discourse as well as to predict thetext structure or to presume the writers'attitude. So the connectives are important toreading comprehension and discourse composition (Chapter1, Chapter 2). Second, it iswidely believed the connectives are so common and simple that the college studentsmust have mastered them quite well. Unfortunately, various first-hand and second-handstudies indicate our college students, though familiar with connectives, are far fromgood at using them (Chapter 2, Chapter 3).The above two reasons require a serious treatment on the learning of connectivesin college English education. As the formal channel of knowledge acquisition, textbook,of course, should not neglect this important discourse device and the correspondingtraining as well. Therefore, in Chapter4, this thesis focuses on exploring how well thepresent college English textbooks do on this aspect. For lack of time and space, aninvestigation is only conducted on the model texts of two popular college Englishtextbooks—College English and 21^st Century College English. Seven groups ofadversatives from the active word list of the College English Curriculum Requirementsare selected as research samples. Through the comparison of those adversatives'frequency in texts with that in various corpora, as well as the comparisons between twotextbooks, some problems are uncovered on the aspect of the selection and conductionof the connectives in textbooks. Also by comparison with the adversatives'misuses inChinese Learners English Corpus, it is found out there is a close connection betweenstudents'misuses of connectives and the loopholes in the compilation of connectives intextbook-writing, which means textbook arrangement on connectives can influence the...