Cohesion Theory And English Writing Teaching In Senior High Schools

Since Halliday and Hasan developed the text function theory in 1976, more and more researchers have applied it to text analysis. Being one of the components of functional grammar, cohesion theory has been introduced and studied widely in China and has aroused great interest among Chinese scholars. But unfortunately its application to foreign language teaching is far from satisfactory, especially in teaching foreign language writing. Most teachers in high schools in China limit their writing teaching to words, phrases, sentences and grammar. Explaining and practicing vocabulary and structure still remains a 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 cohesion theory to English writing teaching in high schools, in the hope of efficiently improving students'writing proficiency.The thesis analyzes the current situation of English writing teaching and learning in high schools in China by means of two questionnaires conducted for teachers and students in Shandong Experimental High School. The questionnaires concern teachers'strategies of teaching writing, ways of assessing students writing, the awareness of text coherence, the process of teaching and learning writing, learners'writing strategies and habits, and the effects of our teaching and learning English writing. 21 teachers as well as 295 Grade Two students participated 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 development of students'writing competence. Meanwhile, the writer collects essays from students of Grade Two, analyzing their existing problems at grammatical and lexical level. Both the questionnaires and samples collected from original students'compositions indicate that Chinese students are not capable of employing cohesive devices effectively to achieve the textual coherence for their essays, especially the misuse of conjunctives and insufficient use of lexical cohesive ties. In addition, lack of linguistic knowledge and different discourse characteristics resulting from different ways of thinking between Chinese and Westerners are a main cause for discourse errors. An effective way to raise students'discourse awareness is to strengthen discourse analysis in the process of reading and improve the traditional approach to teaching writing.How to apply cohesion theory to the practice of teaching and learning writing is a most important and difficult matter. Holding the view that cohesion theory plays a vital role in producing a coherent, fluent and extended piece of writing. The writer puts forward a mode to employ the text cohesion theory 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 and appreciating the models from the textbook and the second stage is to practise these devices in a variety of forms.Through the research, analysis and study, the writer draws a conclusion that the application of cohesion theory into senior high school English writing is both necessary and important. However, the research is only conducted from the perspective of non-structural level, that is, reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical. Besides this, we should analyze from the structural level, that is, information structure and thematic structure. Nevertheless, I still hope the thesis will serve to arouse the attention of both teachers and students at high schools to the development of writing skill and the situation of teaching English compositions at senior high schools will be improved.