A Study Of Textual Coherence In Chinese College Students' EFL Argumentative Compositions

The study is an investigation into the textual coherence of Chinese college students' argumentative compositions under a framework proposed by Cheng (程晓堂, 2005). The research is aimed at finding out if the compositions have coherence problems. Moreover, a questionnaire is adopted to see whether the college students have awareness toward textual coherence when they are writing EFL (English as a Foreign Language) compositions.The research subjects are 60 Chinese college students of four different majors from China University of Petroleum (East China), who are all sophomores. The research mainly has two parts: first the students are asked to complete the questionnaires handed to them; second they are required to finish an argumentative composition entitled " Should the University Campus Be Open to Tourists? " with no less than 120 words in 30 minutes in class. After that, their answers to the questionnaires are collected, and their argumentative compositions are analyzed under the framework of textual coherence proposed by Cheng in four perspectives, namely thematic structures, information structures, propositional macrostructures and generic macrostructures (程晓堂, 2005). At last, the result of the questionnaire and that of the students' compositions are compared to see whether the two results can fit each other. If the two results come to fit each other, some meaningful implications should be drawn for the EFL writing instruction.The major findings of the research are of two aspects. The first aspect is the result of the questionnaire. It is found that Chinese college students do not pay much attention to textual coherence during their writing, and their knowledge about textual coherence is very poor. The second aspect is the descriptive presentation, in which the various types of inappropriate choice of themes and improper adoption of dominant themes, the various types of inappropriate information distributions, the failures in supporting the final discoursal macroproposition, and the failures in keeping obligatory elements of the generic macrostructures in the argumentative compositions written by Chinese college students are found, demonstrated and discussed. Findings of the present study show that Chinese college students know little about textual coherence and they cannot keep the textual coherence during their EFL argumentative writing because of their lack of textual coherence knowledge. Although the teachers teach coherence knowledge in the writing instructions, the students still can not do well in this aspect.This study is of pedagogical significance in that it can help teachers and students realize the importance of textual coherence knowledge, namely thematic structures, information structures, propositional macrostructures and generic macrostructures, in enhancing the students' writing proficiency. Findings of this study imply that both teachers and students should enhance their awareness of textual coherence, and teachers should strengthen their textual coherence instructions in their English classes.