Application Of Cohesion And Coherence Theory To Senior High School English Writing

In the last three decades or so, the theory of textual cohesion and coherence has become an important notion in text analysis, and has attracted growing attention from linguistics of different schools. It has been introduced and studied widely in China and has aroused great interest of Chinese scholars. However, application of the theory to foreign language teaching is by far not satisfactory, especially in English writing teaching at high school. Most of the teachers in high schools haven't taken the importance of textual cohesion in English writing seriously. Consequently, high school students' writing skill is very poor. How to improve the English writing teaching is always one of the main issues the English teachers have to encounter in high schools. Under this background, the thesis tries to undertake an empirical study to improve the high school students' writing with the theory of textual cohesion and coherence, which plays an important role in the structure of English writing.Firstly, the thesis discusses the importance and necessity of improving the high school students' writing. Then, the thesis makes a brief review of the relevant text coherence theories and the relevant researches previously made on the application of the theory to the English writing teaching, especially the cohesion theory of Halliday and Hasan.Secondly, the thesis analyzes the current situation of English writing teaching and learning in high schools at home by means of a questionnaire conducted in Suzhou Foreign Language School. The results of the questionnaire show that the English writing teaching in high school is worrying. Problems exist both in teachers' teaching and students' learning. On the one hand, there are not only various mistakes in language points but also in the misuses of cohesion. On the other hand, although teachers realize the importance of English writing, they still don't take English writing teaching seriously.According to the author's investigation and teaching experience, the author puts forward a hypothesis: the combination of the text coherence and the writing teaching and learning in high schools may be a good way to improve the students' English writing competence. The four- month teaching experiment in two classes in Senior Two of Suzhou Foreign Language School is conducted from three aspects: infiltrating text coherence in regular English classes, arranging regular English writing classes and systematically training how to apply text coherence to English writing, improving the ways of evaluating and commenting the students' compositions. And during the teaching experiment, a pre-test and a post-test are given to students to test their competence of writing.The experimental average results show that the above teaching mode which 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 makes some suggestions as to the ways of improving the English writing teaching and learning in high schools in China.