A Study On The Application Of Cohesion Theory To College English Writing Teaching Of Non-English Majors

The publication of the book Cohesion in English written by Halliday and Hasan in 1976 marked the establishment of cohesion theory. Meanwhile, Halliday was the first to put forward this concept as a technical term in text linguistics (1962). Ever Since the appearance of the book, this notion has drawn attention of a great many linguists to conduct researches on it theoretically and experimentally.Writing, as an indispensable language skill, plays an important role in English learning. However, with years of English learning experience, quite a large number of English learners still find it difficult to compose a semantically coherent article. Just like Waiters (1983:17) descried, writing is the last and perhaps most difficult skill students learn if they ever do. For EFL learners, one obvious difficulty lies in producing grammatical and meaningful sentences, the other even more difficult one is to make all the sentences semantically and logically connected, in other words, to make all the sentences coherent. Taking this into account, the author attempts to design a study aiming at analyzing the relationship between cohesion and EFL learners'writing quality as well as the necessity of putting cohesion theory into college English writing teaching, and it is expected that this study will provide reference data for the pedagogical reform of college English writing teaching.The theoretical basis of this study is Halliday and Hasan's (1976/2001) cohesion theory. According to their taxonomy of cohesive devices, the two categories of grammatical devices and lexical devices can be further subcategorized into reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, reiteration and collocation, the last two being lexical devices.The whole study is guided by the following major research questions: 1) How frequently is each cohesive device used in college non-English major students'essays? 2) Will a systematic instruction of cohesion knowledge contribute to the improvement of students'writing quality? 3) What is the correlation between the number of cohesive devices and the quality of writing? 4) Which subcategory of the cohesive devices plays a more important role in improving students'writing quality?In order to reach the objective, the author conducts a questionnaire, an interview and two tests (pretest and posttest). Questionnaire is carried out among 202 students from the same grade and same major. Its purpose is to explore the present situation of students'English writing and the difficulty they have and their awareness of textual cohesion. Interview, whose subjects are 27 teachers who work at the front line of college English teaching, aims to find out the present situation of college English writing teaching and ensure the practicability of teaching cohesion knowledge to students. Pretest and posttest are conducted in two classes with 202 students, one of which is the experimental class (EC), the other being the control class (CC).50 compositions are randomly selected from the EC and another 50 from the CC to be processed by statistical analysis like frequency, independent T-test, paired T-test and correlation analysis.Through the frequency analysis, the first research question is solved. The result indicates that lexical cohesion is the most frequently used cohesive device. Next is reference, and then conjunction. Independent T-test of data for EC and CC in pretest and in posttest shows that there is no significant difference between EC and CC in the pretest and there is a significant difference between EC and CC in the posttest, which means the instruction of cohesion knowledge contributes to the improvement of students'writing quality. Correlation analysis is used to identify correlation between the number of cohesive devices and the quality of writing and which subcategory of cohesive devices is closest connected to the quality of writing. The results suggest that there is positive correlation between them. And among the five cohesive devices, lexical cohesion is closest correlated with the score of the composition. These results, therefore, give answers to research questions 3 and 4. Finally, a conclusion is drawn and some pedagogical suggestions are provided with the hope that students'textual awareness be strengthened, and as a result they can use cohesive knowledge to serve their English writing to improve the writing quality.