A Study Of Textual Coherence In The English Argumentative Compositions Of English Major Students At Junior Grades

Textual analysis has long been important in linguistics research and foreign language teaching, with the textual coherence as one of the most complex and important issues. Since Harris proposed the concept of discourse analysis. Halliday and Hasan further have developed and systematized textual cohesion mechanism and register theory, and meanwhile disclosed their relationship with textual coherence. But the inefficiency and criticism then emerged since too much emphasis was paid to the decisive role played by cohesion while the deeper structure hidden was ignored. This study, combining Halliday's information structure and theme-rheme structure with Van Dijk's propositional macrostructures and generic macrostructures, with reference to a more comprehensive theoretical framework by Cheng Xiaotang conducts an empirical research on the status quo of Chinese college students'argumentative writing.The study adopts the quantitative analysis and questionnaires approach. The subjects are the argumentative compositions by English majors of Grade 2 in Shanxi Datong University. Three questions are to be researched:①Are there any shared characteristics in the analyzed compositions?②What are cohesive devices mainly used by the students?③What is the distribution and frequency of microstructure and macro structure in the compositions? The study aims at investigating the use of cohesive devices on vocabulary level, the features of thematic progression and information structure, and the application of propositional structure and generic structure of the collected compositions. Questionnaire is adopted as the supplement for composition analysis. Four factors were involved in the questionnaire design:planning, choosing materials and production in the writing process, the habitual thinking and personal knowledge about textual coherence.This study is to reveal the common problems in the English composition by Chinese college students, and to help the teachers and the students to realize the importance of textual coherence. It is pointed out that Chinese college students should try to enrich their textual knowledge while the teachers should strengthen their instructions of textual coherence as early as possible in English classes.