Cohesion Theory And The Teaching Of College English Writing

English writing, as a basic language skill for second languagelearners, has always been paid close attention to by researchers andlanguage teachers. For many teachers and students, compared with otherbasic skills, i.e. listening, speaking, reading and translating, producing aclear, fluent and coherent piece of writing is a great challenge. It is theskill that even some native speakers feel hard to master. Therefore, howto achieve better results in English teaching and how to develop students'writing competence remains an arduous task for English teachers.In the past decades, numerous researchers and experts from homeand abroad have done large amounts of studies on English writing andhave made a lot of achievements. Nevertheless, few of the studies havegained satisfying effects when applied to the teaching process. In thepractice of writing teaching, teachers tend to concentrate on developingstudents' skills of choosing right words or producing meaningfulsentences, or guiding them to write by imitating certain writing patterns.However, developing students' awareness of texture is often neglected,and the application of cohesive devices in their writing, which plays animportant role in creating a fluent and coherent work, has not been paidenough attention to. Thus, many of the students' compositions are lack oftexture and fail to meet the requirements of the National Syllabus.Therefore, the author of this thesis maintains that improving students'awareness of texture, especially stressing on the application of cohesivedevices in promoting coherence and the texture of their writing workshould be given priority to in English writing teaching studies.In linguistic fields, cohesion theory has gained more and moreattention, and cohesion has become one of the major elements indiscourse analysis. According to Halliday and Hasan, cohesion is of greatimportance in coherence and is critical for the creation of texture.Nevertheless, few studies on Chinese students' English writings throughthe discussion of cohesion theory have been accomplished. So the presentthesis is intended to explore the importance and necessity of applyingcohesion theory to improve the texture of Chinese students' compositionsand the teaching of college English writing.With the participation of 146 first-year college students who arenon-English majors, through the analysis of the errors of cohesive devicesin the students' compositions, a tentative study is carried out in this thesis.The study is based mainly on cohesion theory and is carried out byfollowing the procedures of error analysis. The classifications of cohesivedevices in this study are made according to Halliday and Hasan'stheoretical system, which include grammatical cohesion such as reference,substitution, ellipsis and conjunction and lexical cohesion. Many originalsentences quoted from the students' compositions are analyzed and thussupply sufficient data for this study.The major findings of the study indicate that errors of variouscohesive devices are quite common in students' writing, and the qualityof students' writing is, to a degree, associated with the application ofcohesive devices, i.e. the high-scored compositions contain morecohesive devices and fewer errors of these ties while the low-scoredcompositions contain less cohesive devices and more errors. Tentativeexplanations and analysis of the errors are also made, the causes arevarious, including the poor grammatical and lexical competence and theinfluence of negative transfer of Chinese, but students' weak sense oftexture in writing can be regarded as the root cause.On the basis of the major findings, the author discusses the necessityand feasibility of integrating cohesion theory into the teaching of collegeEnglish writing. Suggestions are put forward on how to carry out theintegrated approach in the ways of equipping teachers with cohesiontheory as a theoretical guidance;introducing cohesion theory to thestudents;trying to overcome negative transfer from the native language,and using effective activities in teaching.Through the analysis, research and tentative study, the author makes aconclusion that the integration of cohesion theory into college Englishwriting is both necessary and feasible. However, the research is stilllimited with a lot of unsolved problems, and the application and functionof cohesion theory in English writing teaching is still open to furtherstudy and discussion. Hopefully, the present thesis may shed light on anyfurther research.