The Analysis On The Problems Of Textual Coherence In Non-English Major Students' English Writing

Writing is a very complicated task even performed in one's mother tongue and aconsiderably more difficult enterprise when carried out in a foreign language. Therefore, EFLwriting has attracted many researchers. Analysis has been done at different linguistic levels,by different approaches, and from various perspectives.With the publication of Halliday and Hasan's Cohesion in English (1976), more andmore linguists and educators paid attention to the effect of coherence theory on EFL teaching.They contributed much to the research. Coherence theory can be applied to all the respects ofEFL teaching, while writing has the closest connection with the theory.Most of writing books, nowadays, only focus on helping learners grasp the cohesivedevices of English. However, EFL teachers have still found in their students'compositionsthat sentences, assessed in isolation, are grammatically correct and yet the overall effect isincoherent. Some researches were on the relationship between cohesive devices and textualcoherent errors, or thematic structure and textual coherent errors, but it is hard to find theresearch on the relationship between the situational context and textual coherent errors, or theanalysis of textual coherent errors in EFL students'compositions in three aspects---cohesiondevices, thematic structure, and the situational context, let alone researching textual coherenterrors in non-English major students'English writing in terms of these three respects at thesame time,.However, according to Zhang Delu (2003), EFL students should pay attention to textualcoherence when writing their compositions. According to his suggestion, based on coherencetheories, I did research, attempting to test and apply coherence theories by analyzing thecoherent errors in non-English major students'English writing in terms of these three respectsto get some illumination for EFL writing teaching and learning.Through a study of 120 English argumentative writings conducted by non-English majorstudents who are studying in Tonghua Teachers'College, coherent errors in the three respectsof cohesion devices, thematic structure, and the situational context are identified and analyzed.The errors in two respects---cohesive devices and the thematic structure are the major factorsthat degrade the coherence in non-English major students'English writings, and cause thedifficulty for native speakers to comprehend what the writers intend to mean.The research results found in the thesis are not only due to the above reasons but thecombination of several factors—insufficiency of students'linguistic competence, theinterference of native language, some language teachers'and students'responsibility forcoherent errors, all these contributing to the difficult situation for Chinese learners toconstruct a fluent and coherent text. Therefore, both teachers and learners should pay attentionto these factors.