The Application Of Cohesion Theory To Improving Writing Teaching In High Schools

Discourse analysis has, since the 1950s, gained considerable achievements,which has received the international attention. Cohesion theory, which reflects theconnection between the structural components of discourse, has aroused the commoninterest in modern linguistics. According to linguists, any text must be coherent andcohesive;coherence comes first and cohesion can help to strength and consolidate thecoherence of a text. They are the important in English texts.However, Cohesion has long been neglected in English writing teaching in China,especially in senior middle schools, and little has been done to improve the worryingsituation. Most teachers focus their attention on the "accuracy" of compositions, andignore the coherence of the writing. As a result, writing is inevitably seen as a tediouschore for all involved. Many students are gradually losing their interest andconfidence in English writing, and some of them even deliberately avoid Englishwriting tasks. Some middle school English teachers and researchers have put forwardsome suggestions to improve students' writing abilities, but little research is done onthe application of cohesion and coherence to English writing. The author thinks thatthe more the students know about cohesion and coherence, the more consciously theywill try to improve their writing ability.The research that the author did revealed that students' writing levels don'tcorrespond with their English levels --the years of their language learning. By thestudy of 20 English compositions written by Chinese students in NMET, errors ofcohesive devices are quite common, which are major factors that degrade the qualityof the students' English writings and are the ones that cause great difficulty forstudents' compositions.In order to improve students' writing skills and foster their awareness of cohesivedevices, this thesis attempts to set forth the idea of application cohesion andcoherence to the teaching of English writing. There are two main aspects: the trainingof cohesion, which includes grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion, and thetraining of coherence.The results of the experiment, which lasts for six months show that the studentstrained with cohesion and coherence learning, perform better than those withouttraining. That means the application of cohesion and coherence to the teaching ofEnglish writing is a good way to improve students' writing ability.However, it is only a tentative study, which is open to improvement and criticism.The author sincerely hopes that the findings of this thesis will be enlightening toeducation practitioners;at last it will shed light on the way forward.