Study Of The Relationship Between Clause Relation And The Coherence Of EFL College Writing

Recently researchers of applied linguistics have employed theories of discourse analysis to study the problems existing in EFL students'writing, such as thematic structure, information structure and cohesion theory. This thesis is an application of the clause relation theory to the study of the coherence of students'compositions.It is hypothesized that 1) one of the reasons why EFL students'writing lacks coherence is that some EFL students fail to manipulate clause relations appropriately; 2) there exists a negative correlation between the coherence of the composition and the number of misused clause relations. 120 students of second-year non-English majors and 30 English teachers from Bohai University and Liaoning University of Technology participate in this study. This study adopts sample composition analysis and questionnaires to prove the hypotheses mentioned above. At first, the researcher analyzes 120 non-English majors'compositions according to the procedures proposed by Hoey, and picks out the misused clause relations. Two qualified teachers rate the compositions based on the same criterion. The relationship between the coherence of the composition and the number of misused clause relations is analyzed by SPSS software. The questionnaires are distributed to teachers and students respectively to examine students'writing problems from the angle of teaching and learning. The results reveal that many students fail to manipulate clause relations appropriately, which makes the EFL students'compositions lack coherence. Besides, there exists a negative correlation between the coherence of the composition and the number of misused clause relations.According to the composition evaluation, misused clause relations include lack of logic/semantic relation between adjacent sentences or weak relation, inappropriate use of transitional words, topic break/drift, sentences in reverse order and redundant sentence. According to the results of the composition evaluation and the questionnaires, it is concluded that these problems are mainly caused by roundabout pattern of Chinese writing, paratactic language, students'relatively low English proficiency and teachers'neglect of coherence teaching.Based on the findings, some suggestions on English teaching and learning are put forward. While teaching, teachers can raise students'rhetorical awareness, teach knowledge of discourse analysis, such as clause relation, and focus on the process of writing. As for students, they should get into good learning habits, such as read a lot, write regularly, utilize outline and employ revision strategy. These suggestions will help students to construct a coherent composition.It is hoped that the analysis in this paper will be helpful to some English teachers who are wondering how to deal with the incoherent problem of students'writing, and to the English learners who are suffering from not knowing how to write coherently.