Coherence And Cohesion In Enhancing Writing Quality Of Middle School Students

In English writing, the importance of cohesion and coherence can be overemphasized. In students‘compositions, there are many mistakes and errors coming out of the lack of English cohesion and coherence.This is due to differences on discourse between English and Chinese and there is strong influence of Chinesediscourse. What will happen if the students master the knowledge of differences on discourse between the twolanguages? The study made good use of the theory advancements of coherence and cohesion. It is the theoreticalbase of making a more scientific tool to grade the compositions in the research and the same time the guide cantruly reflect the discourse nature of.compositions. The study also took the advantages of some previous research.It is with the intention of exploring the question whether the teaching of coherence and cohesion can enhance thequality of English writing in the middle schools.The study was based on the theory of coherence and cohesion coming from the three advancements in thisaspect and the resent writing research results both home and abroad. The subjects were two classes from theSenior Two students in Guangyuan Middle School, Sichuan. It was conducted through paper scores．Around theEnglish writing teaching are the following several questions around English writing:(1), Can the learning ofeach item of coherence and cohesion have effect on the middle school students (2),Does the theory of coherenceand cohesion have influence on writing?(3) Does the theory of coherence and cohesion have influence onEnglish learning.After one term experiment, all the statistics were analyzed through SPSS on the difference andcorrelation. This study has yielded several findings:(1), Though the theory of cohesion and coherence is abstract,it can be mastered by the middle school students.(2),Though the statistics showed no significance,the testedclass performed better than the contrast class on writing.(3), The tested class performed a little better than thecontrast class on English learning.(4), The items, usage of conjunctive, transitivity and thematic progression arecorrelated with the writing performance. They can be taught first.(5), Conjunctives are correlated withreference and transitivity; thematic progression is correlated with reference and transitivity; Reference iscorrelated with thematic progression, reference and transitivity.(6), There is some correlation between thetraditional grading guide and the new one concerning coherence and cohesion, because it involves the questionwhether they can be applied in the middle school English teaching willingly.The current study has several implications. The theory of cohesion and coherence can be applied to the middle school English teaching.When teaching about cohesion and coherence, some items of them should betaught first and some can be taught together to some degree. The future scoring guide should given more thoughtto coherence and cohesion.