| English writing occupies an important and indispensable position in English teaching. However, of the four basic language skills----listening, speaking, reading and writing---- writing is the weakest point of college students in China. Recent research into student writing shows that the lack of cohesion and coherence in the flow of ideas through a composition is one of the major problems (Du Jinbang,2001; Zhang Zaixin, 1995).Cohesion theory is an important part of systemic functional linguistics. According to Halliday and Hasan, cohesion is of great importance in achieving coherence in writing a text. Recently, cohesion has been paid much attention to by linguists. Their studies show that Chinese learners have much difficulty in choosing and applying cohesive devices, but they haven't made enough explorations on the reasons for these problems or ways to avoid these problems for Chinese vocational college students. Furthermore, few studies on Chinese vocational students' English writings concerning cohesion theory have been accomplished and they have given fewer further explorations on how to apply cohesive devices to writing class aiming to improve students' writing ability. This paper is intended to explore the importance and necessity of applying cohesion theory to improving the texture of Chinese vocational college students' compositions and the teaching of vocational college English writing. This paper is focused on the following three aspects:①Whether the teaching of cohesion contributes to the improvement of English writing performance? Which or what cohesive devices play a greater role in improving the quality of writing?②whether there is a positive correlation between the number of cohesive devices and the quality of writing?③What cohesion problems are there in their writing and what are the possible causes for these problems?Two classes from the Department of Literature, Law and Politics were chosen as subjects for the experiment that lasted for 16 weeks. The two classes were named the Experimental Class (EC) and the Control Class (CC) respectively. The two classes were taught the same content except the EC adding cohesion teaching. The two classes did the same amount of exercise as before. Each student wrote six compositions, which were rated by three experienced teachers according to the rating scale for the writing item of PRETCO. The data were collected and then analyzed.A qualitative analysis of the use of cohesive devices in the sample compositions shows that there are cohesive problems in the students' essay including grammatical cohesion such as the use of conjunctions and lexical devices, and such problems are mainly caused by mother tongue transfer, cultural difference and limited language proficiency. Through the experiment, the author finds that the quality of students' writing is closely related to the application of cohesive devices; that is to say, there are more devices and fewer relevant errors in high-scored composition while the low-scored compositions contain less cohesive devices and more errors. In addition, the author finds that the writing quality of the students in the experimental class improves after the intentional teaching of cohesive devices through the comparison of the overall quality of the papers of the pretest and posttest. At the same time cohesion problems in the subjects'writing can be attributed to language transfer, cultural difference and limited language proficiency.The findings of this study suggest that the cohesion teaching is necessary and feasible in vocational college English writing class and provide some important pedagogical implications for writing teaching. |
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