An Empirical Research On The Improvement Of Textual Cohesion In College English Writing By Action Research

The ability of writing is one of the important foreign language skills a collegestudent should master. The practicing of English writing is an effective way to checkout and improve college students’ comprehensive ability of using English language.It is one of the aims of college English teaching to train students to have a strongerwriting competence. Writing occupies a great proportion in college students’ varioustests. However, most students’ writing achievements are not so ideal and there are alot of errors and defects in their writings. Among these, the weakness of organizingthe text is one of the error performances in students’ writings. There exist thesetypical problems: less coherence of text, unclear arrangement and presentation, lessoutstanding subject, and lack of English textual cohesion and textual coherence, evenlack of the ability of text layout. That’s the drawback because we pay too muchattention to teaching words and sentences but neglect the textual comprehension andpractice.This thesis is conducted on the basis of the theoretical framework of textual cohesiontheory and action research. It aims to improve students’ textual cohesion awarenessand at the same time to improve writing teaching approach by putting into effect anaction research practice and applying some related theories to the practice of collegeEnglish writing teaching. During the process the teacher studied the related theoriesand improved their own teaching competence.The steps of action research are as follows:1) Focusing on the question. The teacherfound out the aspects textual cohesion problems appeared which were made bycollege non-English major students.2) Proposing a project. Aiming at the errors thatstudents made, the teacher designed a project to solve them.3) Carrying out theproject. The teacher put into effect the project according to the designed plan. Duringthe process the teacher found out problems in time and adjusted them timely.4)Evaluating the effect. After finishing the whole project, the teacher summed up the problems and made adjustment according to the problems which appeared during theprocess in order to prepare for the study of the next period. The four steps can form acircular chain and each end of an action research can inspire a new circle of actionresearch.