Toward A Multi-angle View Of Coherence In Chinese English Learners' Writing In English

Since the publication of Cohesion in English in 1976 by Halliday and Hasan, textual coherence has become an important notion in text analysis, and has attracted growing attention from linguists of different schools. In practice, after years of studying English as a Foreign Language, many Chinese English learners are still unable to produce coherent English writing. The sharp contrast between theory and practice brings this thesis into being.The purpose of this thesis is to find out effective ways for enhancing coherence in Chinese English learners' English writing by combining the different theories about coherence with the writing practice. To be specific, this thesis seeks to solve these problems: what on earth is coherence according to the theoretical studies, how to realize this view of coherence in text, and how to use the discoveries to guide the writing practice.For that purpose, the author first makes a review of different theories about coherence, such as Dan and Fries' Thematic Progression Theory, Halliday and Hasan's Theory of Cohesion and Register, Van Dijk's Theory of Macrostructures, Widdowson's Illocutionary Act Theory, Brown and Yule's Cognitive Frame Theory and so on. Due to the inadequacy of any individual theory in explaining coherence, it is thus advisable to adopt a multi-angle view of coherence in writing, and to treat it as an integrated coherence that consists of syntactic coherence, semantic coherence, stylistic coherence, and pragmatic coherence. Next, the author successively deals with such problems as the definitions of the aspects of an integrated coherence, the conditions for realizing those aspects in text, and the strategies for realizing an integrated coherence in Chinese English learners' English writing based on those conditions. As Chinese students learn English as a Foreign Language, many of the strategies involve avoidance of negative transfer from Chinese. Finally, the author puts the notion of an integrated coherence to practical use by revising incoherent compositions of Chinese students into coherent ones with consideration from all the four aspects of it.