Textual Metafunctional Analysis On College Students' Writing Coherence

Coherence has always been an important aspect in English writing teaching. However, many Chinese linguists and English teachers study coherence mainly from cohesive devices such as grammatical and lexical cohesion, while ignoring the 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. Theoretically, the three systems combine together to contribute to the coherence of English compositions. This study tries to examine the coherence in present Chinese college students'English compositions from these three aspects. In this thesis, both quantitative and qualitative approaches are employed to analyze the questionnaires and students'compositions from the three aspects of textual metafunction. As few studies have dealt with coherence on the theoretical basis of all the parts of textual metafunction, this study is a tentative study on coherence of students'compositions from this perspective. Hopefully, this paper can contribute to the present coherence teaching and therefore has certain significance to college English writing instruction in China.