On Text Coherence In High School English Writing

The last three decades or so have seen a considerable growth of interest in text linguistics. As a unit of language beyond sentence level, text has been widely studied in descriptive and applied linguistics. Being one of the components of textual function, text coherence has been introduced and studied widely in China and has aroused great interest of Chinese scholars. But unfortunately its application to foreign language teaching is by far not satisfactory, especially in foreign language writing teaching. Most of teachers in high schools in China limit their writing teaching to words, phrases, sentences and grammar. Explaining and practicing vocabulary and structure still remains the main task while the cultivation of textual awareness has not been taken seriously. Consequently, lack of awareness of cohesion and coherence can be found in most students' compositions. Both the teachers and the students feel it quite difficult to produce a coherent, fluent and extended piece of writing. How to change the situation in writing teaching is just one of the main issues we English teachers have to encounter in high schools. In this case, as an English teacher in high school for many years, the writer feels it urgent to introduce the text coherence theories to high schools writing teaching, in the hope of improving students writing proficiency efficiently.Firstly, the thesis analyzes the current situation of English writing teaching and learning in high schools in China by means of a questionnaire conducted in Wuhan No. 2 Middle School. The questionnaires concern teachers' strategies of writing teaching, ways of assessing students writing, the awareness of text coherence, the process of writing teaching and learning, learners' writing strategies and habits, and the effects of our English writing teaching and learning. About 200 students in different classes in this school participate in the survey. The results of the questionnaire show that most of the teachers and students don't take the text coherence seriously in their writing teaching and learning practice and the problem becomes a great obstacle to the developing of students writing competence, hence the writer of this theses puts forward a hypotheses: the combination of the text coherence and the writing teaching and learning in high schools maybe be a good way to improve the students' English writing competence.Secondly, the writer does a brief review of the relevant text coherence theories. Itdefines the term text and the concept of coherence from the perspective of the textual function and presents a framework of the text coherence from the perspective of semantic level, structural level, grammatical level and lexical level.How to apply the text coherence theories to the practice of writing teaching and learning is the most important and difficult matter. There are already some approaches to the writing teaching and learning in the present, such as "the product-based approach" and "the process-based approach" and so on, however, these approaches focus on the writing strategies itself but not on the awareness and strategies of the whole text coherence. If students get little knowledge about the text coherence, even if they have a good command of the writing strategies, it is still difficult for them to produce a coherent, fluent and extended piece of writing. So the writer tries to put forward a mode to combine the text coherence theories and "the process-based approach" to guide the current writing teaching and learning. The whole mode is divided into two stages: the first stage is to arouse the students' awareness of the concept of text coherence and at the same time present detailed training strategies for the students to master the various coherent devices in the form of presenting, analyzing or appreciating the models and practicing these devices afterwards. The second stage is to get the students master some strategies on how to develop sentences into paragraphs and further into a whole coherent text.To test whether the mode is effective in improving students' writing competence, the writer conducts a three-month experiment with the students in two classes in Wuhan No.2 Middle School. Our experimental average results reported in this paper show the mode that combines the text coherence and English writing teaching and learning has significantly improved the writing proficiency of the students.Finally, the writer summarizes the thesis, addresses its limitations and at the same time makes some suggestions as to the ways of improving the English writing teaching and learning in high schools in China.