Impacts Of Chinese-Western Logic Discrepancy On Coherence In College English Writing

Writing is a significant part and necessary basic capacity in English Learning. And there are various standards for a successful writing, in which the textual coherence is indispensible. The appearance of Halliday and Hasan's Cohesion in English (1976) aroused more and more linguists'and educators'attention to the effect of coherence theory on EFL teaching. While as an important section of ESL teaching, writing is closely connected with the coherence theory. Most of writing books nowadays, only focus on helping learners grasp the cohesive devices of English. However, the influencing factors of textual coherence in EFL writing are of diversity, among which the Chinese and Western logical discrepancies are impacting more and more distinctively on the textual coherence in College EFL Writing.This thesis aims at testing and applying coherence theories by analyzing the logical coherent errors in college students'English writing in terms of three aspects of logical connector, thematic progression and macrostructure to get some illumination for ESL writing teaching and learning. Through a study of 300 English compositions conducted by the students studying in China University of Petroleum, coherent errors in the above respects are identified and analyzed. The errors of logical connectors and thematic progression are the major factors that degrade the coherence in college students'English writings, and cause difficulties for native speakers to comprehend what the writers intend to mean.The research results of the thesis are not only due to the above reasons but the combination of several factors, such as insufficiency of students'linguistic competence and logical ability, the interference of native language, the negative effect of traditional teaching method and the ignorance of logical and background knowledge input, all these contributing to the difficult situation for Chinese learners to construct a fluent and coherent text. Therefore, both teachers and learners should pay attention to these factors.