Application Of Cohesion Theory To The Writing Of Junior College Students

Of the four basic language skills listening, speaking, reading and writing, writing occupies an important and indispensable position. However, writing is the weak point of college students. In recent years research into student writing shows that one of the major problems is the lack of coherence in the flow of ideas through a composition (Du Jinbang, 2001; Zhang Zaixin, 1995).Cohesion theory is an important component of systemic functional linguistics. According to Halliday and Hasan, cohesion plays a very important role in the creation of coherence. Recently, cohesion has drawn much of linguists' attention. Their studies show that Chinese learners have much difficulty in using cohesive devices and cannot use cohesive devices properly. Consequently, the misuse of these cohesive devices affects or even violates the coherence of the text. But to date, they haven't explored the reasons for these problems or helped to try to avoid these problems for Chinese learners of English. Furthermore, they are mainly concerned with establishing theoretical models for cohesion and do not give further explorations on how to apply cohesive devices to writing class aimed at improving students' writing ability.Taking these aspects into account, the author decides to conduct an empirical study to try to improve writing teaching in Chinese Junior College students' context, and it is expected that this study will provide some pedagogical implications for English writing course. Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theory, which has had a major impact on the understanding and the teaching of cohesion, is employed in the present study.This paper is designed to explore:â‘ What cohesive problems are there in the writing of Junior college students? And what are the possible reasons for these problems?â‘¡Does the intentional teaching of cohesive devices help learners improve their writing, especially argumentative writing performance?Two junior classes of the Computer Science Department are chosen as participants. The experiment lasts for 16 weeks. Both classes have the same amount of exercises, but the focuses of the teacher's guidance are different: the Control Class(CC) get the traditional writmg guidance, such as sentence structure, choice of words and phrases, and stylistic variation, etc; while the Experimental Class(EC) are taught cohesive devices and assigned to do relevant focused exercises in addition to that of CC. Each class writes six argumentative compositions, which are rated by three experienced English teachers according to the rating scale for the writing item of CET4. The SPSS procedure is used to carry out quantitative analysis.The qualitative analysis of the use of cohesive devices in the sample compositions shows that the students have many cohesive problems in their essays: 1) problems in the use of reference devices; 2) problems related to conjunctions; 3) problems in using lexical devices. Later, through analysis, the author finds that these problems mainly fall into three categories: language transfer, cultural difference and limited language proficiency.In the quantitative study, T-tests are employed to make an examination of the overall quality of the papers of the pretest and posttest in both EC and CC. With all the other variables controlled, the writing quality of students in EC improves after the intentional teaching of cohesive devices. Both t-test and questionnaire demonstrate convincingly that the instruction on cohesion in Junior College students' class facilitates the students' progress in their papers; Furthermore, students in EC are aware of using cohesive devices to make their papers coherent while writing and revising.The findings of this study suggest that the intentional teaching of cohesion is feasible in writing class and provide some important implications for writing teaching and textbook compiling.