The Application Of Cohesion And Coherence Theory To English Writing Teaching In High School

Since the publication of Cohesion in English in 1976 by Halliday and Hasan, textual cohesion and coherence has become an important notion in text analysis, and has attracted growing attention from linguistics of different school. It 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 the teachers in high schools haven't taken the cultivation of textual seriously. Consequently, how to change the situation in writing teaching is just one of the main issues the English teachers have to encounter in high schools. In this case, the thesis decided to engage in empirical study to improve the high school students' writing. Halliday and Hasan's theory, which had a major impact on the understanding and the teaching of cohesion, was employed in this study.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 Nanchang No.1 Railway Middle School. The results of the questionnaires show that cultivation of textual awareness has not been taken seriously by most of teachers in high schools in China and there exist many problems in their writing teaching and learning practice. The problems have become a great obstacle to the developing of students writing competence. Taking the factor into account, the thesis puts forward a hypothesis: apply the cohesion and coherence theory to the writing teaching and learning in high schools to improve the students' English writing competence.Secondly, the thesis does a brief review of the relevant text coherence theories. It defines the concept of cohesion and coherence from the perspective of the textual function and presents a framework of the text coherence from the perspective of grammatical cohesion, lexical cohesion and conjunction. Then the thesis analyzes the cohesion and coherence in Chinese students' compositions by coding scheme and the errors in cohesion in students' English writing.How to apply the text cohesion and coherence theories to the practice of writing...