Investigating The Cohesive Devices In The Oral English Of College Students And Its Implications For Language Teaching

The present thesis is intended to apply the theory of cohesion in systemic functional linguistics to the teaching of oral English in China. After analyzing the cohesive devices used in the data of the oral English texts produced by non-English-major college students, all the cohesive devices that occur in the data are summarized, and the problems are found in the use of cohesive devices in these texts and possible strategies and methods are studied for solving these problems in teaching oral English for non-major students. It is hoped that it can shed some light on the teaching of oral English to non-English major students in this aspect in China.There are altogether five chapters in this paper. The first chapter introduces the concepts of cohesion and cohesive devices, and explains how cohesion differs from coherence. Then it discusses the related previous research on cohesion in spoken English, after a summery of the results of the previous research. In Chapter Two, This chapter presents the research design of the quantitative study based on the hypotheses drawn from the literature, by providing the detailed descriptions of the subjects, instruments, and procedures for data collection and analysis.Chapter Three presents the results of the study from four aspects: frequencies of the four main types of cohesive devices: reference, ellipsis, substitution and lexical cohesion, and in each part, the relationship between the frequencies and the text quality of students was analyzed. Means and standard deviations of each type of cohesive devices were given in tables and figures. Detailed descriptions about the mistakes and problems occurred in students' texts were provided so as to make a through analysis about the possible reasons why these happened. The results of the some specific example analysis were also reported to show how the frequencies of cohesive devices were related to the quality of spoken English of non-English college students.Based on the results we obtained in the Chapter Three, the Chapter Four discusses possible ways to combine spoken English teaching with the theory of cohesion. Firstly, as listening and speaking skills are closely interrelated, appropriate listening exercise can help students to master cohesive devices better; secondly, it is very meaningful to combine the Communicative activities with spoken English teaching in classroom. In this section, several designed communicative...