A Study On The Strategies Of Taking Dictation For English Majors From The Perspective Of Cohesion Theory

With the development of globalization of economy, the citizens, especiallygraduate students’ foreign language abilities have been increasingly expected moreand more. For English major students, TEM4plays a very important role to both oftheir career and their self development. Test for English Majors Grade4(TEM4) isheld in April every year under the guidance of teaching guidance committee ofcolleges and universities of foreign language majors. It is a primary standard ofevaluating the English level of an English major student. This situation implies theimportance of TEM4. Among all the parts of TEM4, the dictation part is a difficultone for most of the testees. And sometimes it is this test item that affects the wholescore of TEM4and even worse, makes the testees fail the examination. When thestudents are dictating, most of them just listen to the each word or sentence inisolation, and put the emphasis on the single words which they did not understand.They do not pay attention to the whole sentence or the whole paragraph and analyzethe semantic relationship between the linguistic units.According to the syllabus of TEM4(2004), the dictation passages are meaningfultexts. Since it is a text, it is possible to develop a learning strategy of enhancing thedictation ability in the view of cohesion. As an important terminology in textlinguistics, cohesion is an effective practical method to analyze the text. It could bevery helpful to improve the listening level of the students and the teaching effect ofEnglish listening by having student understand and grasp some knowledge ofcohesion theory.But there are few studies combining the cohesion theory with English dictationduring the years2000～2010in China Journal Full-text Database. Combining thecohesion theory which is proposed by Halliday and Hasan, the present study intendsto explore a method of improving the dictation ability by the knowledge of cohesiontheory. The subjects in this survey are sixty English major students from a certain university in Changchun. They are from two classes and their English listening aretaught by the same teacher. They are divided into two parts. One class will learn theknowledge of cohesion theory and they will be taken as experimental group of thepresent research and the other one will be taken as the control group with no cohesiontheory received. Then the present writer chose five dictation texts of TEM4from2006to2009, and tested the EG gradually. After each dictation, the writer would find outthe mistakes and correct them with the students from EG together, and then teach thestudents from EG the knowledge of cohesion and teach them how to apply thecohesion knowledge to correct the mistakes they have made.The research result of the study shows two points. On the one hand, there existsome difficulties when the students are doing listening practices even if they areEnglish major students. Therefore, it is necessary for English teachers to introducesome learning strategies to guide the students how to learn. On the other hand, themastery of certain knowledge of cohesion theory is very effective for theimprovement of English listening ability. From the analysis and tentative study, theauthor makes a conclusion that the integration of cohesion theory into Englishdictation is indispensable and feasible. However, this study has its own limitations.For example, the corpus is limited to only one university so that the findings of thisthesis may not be representative enough. But it is still a hope that the author’s crudemarks may be drawn forth by abler people.