A Study On Coherence In Chinese College Students' English Compositions From Textual Metafunction Perspective

Writing is a very complex task even one performs in his mother tongue and it is a considerably more difficult enterprise when carried out in a foreign language. Therefore, EFL writing has attracted many researchers. Analysis about coherence has been done at different linguistic levels, with different approaches, and from various perspectives. The present study focuses investigation on Chinese college students'compositions from the coherence perspective.The notion of coherence is one of the essential concepts in textlinguistics, and it is also an important quality of effective writing. Coherence is an abstract and fuzzy concept to be exactly defined. Many scholars have tried to define coherence from different perspectives. In the present study, coherence is considered from the thematic progression, information structure and cohesive devices, which are also the three sub-systems of the textual metafunction proposed by Halliday.According to the analysis of the college students'compositions, the author found some problems in the thematic progression and the use of cohesive devices. And in the questionnaire to the college English teachers, we found that most of the English teachers seldom or never taught thematic progression and information theory in their writing instruction. Therefore, it is necessary to enhance teachers'as well as students'awareness of the theories of thematic structure and information structure, and help them use such theories as a kind of vehicle to improve the coherence of students'compositions. Then the author provides some suggestions about teaching methodology, by which college English teachers can teach the theories of thematic structure and information structure to test the feasibility of these theories; meanwhile, the author encourages teaching grammatical and lexical cohesion in English writing instruction process.