A Study On The Application Of Cohesion Theory In EFL Argumentative Writing Teaching

As one of the basic skills in language learning, writing is an indispensable part in the teaching of a foreign language. As to English writing teaching in China, one of the key problems is how to produce a coherent writing. But the present English writing teaching seems to focus toomuch on the sentential level, and pay little, or even no, attention to the discourse level. There is, therefore, an urgent need for improving the organization and coherence in Chinese EFL learners' English compositions. Whether the teaching of cohesion contributes to the improvement of writing performance has been studied by many linguists, but their conclusions have not been consistent. Taking all these into account, the author decided to make a study to check whether the teaching of the knowledge of cohesion is effective in improving the quality of the argumentative writings since quality of this kind of prose is believed to be more closely related to the use of cohesive ties. It is also expected that this study will provide reference data for the pedagogical reform of English writing course. Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theory, which has a major impact on the understanding and the teaching of cohesion, was employed in the present study.This paper was designed to explore: (a) whether the teaching of cohesion is possible;(b) Whether the teaching of cohesion contributes to the improvement of argumentative writing;(c) Whether there exists a correlation between the number of cohesive devices and the quality of argumentative writing;(d) What sub-categoris of cohesive ties are more closely related to the quality of argumentative writing.Two senior classes of English majors were chosen as participants. Both classes were trained according to the length approach which is widely employed by the Chinese teachers of EFL writing and both of them had the same amount of exercises. But the focuses of of their teacher's guidance were different: the guidance the CC got was traditional: such as sentence structures, choice of words and phrases, and stylistic varietion,etc;while the Experimental Class (EC) was taught cohesion in addition to that of CC. Each class wrote six argumentative compositions and the first (pretest),the third (Draft 3 and 4) and the last paper (posttest) were rated by three experienced teachers independently with the rating scale for the writing item in TEM Band 8. The SPSS procedure was used to perform the analysis of the data. First, t-test was employed to make a general examination of the overall quality of the papers of the pretest, posttest, draft 3 and draft 4 in both EC and CC. The result showed that, with all the other variables controlled, the instruction on cohesion improved the writing quality of the EC.In order to find out whether there was a correlation between the number of cohesive devices to the quality of papers, correlation analysis was made. The result showed that there was a positive correlation between the number of cohesive devices and the quality of argumentative writing.To find out what sub-categories of cohesive ties are more closely related with the quality of argumentative writing, the author chose 30 pieces from the final drafts of the SE as samples. The data analysis of the sample showed that there was asignificant difference between the use of cohesive ties in G group and that of the P group: a more frequent use of cohesive devices was found in G group than P group In addition, the using of total cohesive ties has a highly significant correlation with the quality of argumentative writing. But among the three sub-categories of cohesive devices, the use of reference ties is not correlated with the quality of argumentative writing;whereas the use of conjunction ties and lexical ties are significantly correlatedwith the quality of argumentative writing respectively. Further analysis was done to examine how the use of sub-categories of lexical cohesion (repetition, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, metonymy and collocation) are correlated to the quality of students' writing. The statistical analysis showed that among these sub-categories, synonymy, antonymy and collocation are significantly correlated with the quality of students' writing respectively;whereas the ues of repetition, hyponymy and metonymy have no significant influence on the quality of argumentative writing from the statistical point of view.For various reasons, the present study is, by no means, a flawless or an excludingone. But it is the sincere hope from the bottom of the author's heart that it will, to some extent, contributes to Chinese EFL writing teaching.