Study On Textual Coherence In College English Writing

Coherence has always been an important property of English writing teaching. However, many Chinese linguists and English teachers study coherence mainly from overt cohesive devices such as grammatical and lexical cohesion, while ignoring the other two covert cohesive devices, namely thematic structure and information structure. In fact, thematic structure, information structure and cohesion system are the three systems of textual metafunction in systematic functional grammar. This study tries to examine the coherence in present Chinese college students'English compositions from these three aspects. As college students are familiar with grammatical and lexical cohesion, this study focuses on elaborating the guiding effect of thematic structure and information structure to coherence teaching.The present study includes five chapters.The first chapter is a brief introduction. It introduces the study of coherence in history, the problems of our country's writing instruction in terms of coherence, meanwhile, presents the reason for making this study.The second chapter is the literature review of textual coherence in systematic functional grammar, including cohesion,information structure and thematic structure. It is the rationale of this study.Chapter Three examines the status of coherence in EFL students'English compositions from textual metafunction perspective by analyzing questionnaires to both college students and the teachers for writing class and 60 compositions from English majors of Grade Two. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches are employed to analyze the questionnaires and students'compositions from the three aspects of textual metafunction.