Textuality And English Writing Teaching

When talking about the acquisition of foreign languages, people always mention the five basic skills -listening, speaking, reading, and writing, and translating. Many teachers and students think that among the five skills, producing a coherent, fluent and extended piece of writing is the most difficult thing. It is the skill even some native speakers never master. For second or foreign language learners the challenges are much more enormous.Writing is a kind of communicative form. A piece of writing may be regarded as a carrier of information. Unlike spoken form, which is context dependent, usually relies heavily on the shared knowledge between the interactants and often makes reference to the shared actions, written language is context-independent, having the disadvantage of exposing decoder's own feelings and of having to speak clearly and concisely and make immediate response to whichever way his reader reacts. The key point of doing so is how to make the text coherent or acceptable. In order to make itself understandable, a text needs a lot of cohesive ties both within and beyond it.In recent years, the sense of textuality in English writing teaching and learning has gained more and more attention from both the teachers and students. But it is far from being adequate. In today's English writing class in our country, explaining and practicing vocabulary and structure still remains the main task. Most of reference books on English writing are also concerned about such subjects as how to use nice words, how to make smooth sentences, and so on. Consequently, both the teachers and the students feel it quite difficult to improve the quality of writing efficiently. The author of the thesis have taught English writing in college for many years, and felt it necessary to clear up the misconception existing in our actual practice and place textuality to an appropriate position.So far, many linguists home and abroad have studied text theories and supplied us many useful methods to guide our teaching and assessments of students' English writing scientifically. In the first chapter, the author of the thesis does a brief review of these text theories. At the beginning of the chapter, several definitions of text and textuality are given.Then come the components of textuality (seven standards of text) put forward by de Beaugrande and Dressier (1983)---cohesion, coherence, intentionality, acceptability, infonnativity, situationality, and intertextuality. But the thesis mainly describes in detail five of them, i.e. cohesion, coherence, intentionality, infonnativity, and situationality because they are closely related to writing practice. The discussion of the relationship between text theories and writing practice comes at the end of the chapter. Some linguists and researchers' relevant ideas are being shown there. Gu Yueguo (1999) suggests writing teachers do some activities to develop their students a sense of purpose and a sense of audience. These two senses concern intentionality and situationality in de Beaugande and Dressier's seven standards of texts. David Nunan (1999) argues that discourse (i.e. text) and grammar should not be seen separately and that the creation of coherent and cohesive discourse is basically a matter of drawing on the grammatical and discourse features that exist in the language to turn multilinear and multirelated ideas into linear form. There exist various textual devices that can be used to achieve the aim—creating a coherent and cohesive discourse. Zhang Delu & Liu Rushan (2003) give different classifications of cohesive ties, for instance, observed from the distances between the two ends of cohesion, we have immediate tie, mediate tie, and long-distance tie; from whether one of the cohesive end is in-text or out-of-text, we have explicit cohesive ties and implicit cohesive ones; from different covering ranges come two kinds of ties, i.e. local ties and integral ties. In the present survey, the third kind of classification, i.e. explicit or implicit was adopted to tabulate the textual errors in the...