An Experimental Study Of Training College Students To Use Cohesive Devices In Writing

As one of the basic skills in language, writing is of great importance in English teaching. However, in China, besides the problems in grammar and spelling, compositions of university students are weak in the text-organization, fluency and logicality. The traditional approach in writing instruction only emphasizes the correct use of grammar and spelling. Therefore, in order to find a new method to improve students' writing, the author conducts an experiment to apply Halliday's cohesion theory to the language teaching to investigate whether introducing cohesive devices can help improve students' writing quality.Subjects in this research are non-English major students from two classes. All of them are freshmen from Shandong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine. They are assigned as the Control Group (CG) and the Experimental Group (EG). The CG consists of 55 students while the number of students in the EG is 59. During the research, both of the two groups are instructed in the composition structure and a special instruction of cohesion devices is presented to the students in the EGIn this study, 40 students are chosen from each group for the collection of three types of data: English achievements of College Entrance Examination, scores of composition in the pretest and posttest and the numbers of cohesive devices used by students in their compositions. The software SPSS is employed to process the first and second types of data.According to the data analysis, the current research has the following findings:Firstly, after the training, the writing quality of the students in the EG improves significantly. It is much higher than that of the students in the CG.Secondly, more different cohesive ties are used by the students in the EG than the students in the CG in the posttest. In the compositions of the EG, the number of synonyms or near synonyms grows noticeably while the number of personal reference and repetition drops sharply.Thirdly, after the instruction of cohesion theory, students in the EG commit fewer errors in cohesive devices than students in the CG in the posttest. As for the rate of errors, there is a big decline in reference and conjunction in the compositions of the EGBased on the above findings, the conclusion can be drawn that the use of cohesive devices has a positive effect on English writing and the instruction of cohesive devices is achievable and necessary. Therefore, if teachers apply cohesion theory to the teaching of writing, students will make progress in writing.