Correlation Between Ideational Grammatical Metaphor And The Coherence Of College Students’ English Compositions

With an increased interest in English learning, the teaching of English is facing greatchallenges in China. As the embodiment of a comprehensive command of English, writingis complicated process that needs repeated considering and careful polishing. This isespecially difficult for non-English majors. Even though students have been doing great inCET4and CET6examinations in recent years, they showed a poor performance in thewriting part. After the analysis of the problems in students’ writing, it was found out thatstudents’ English, with plain vocabularies and simple sentence patterns, is far fromnative-like. College English Curriculum Requirements makes it clear that college studentsshould be able to write in English with no less than120words within half an hour.Passages that students write must be fully expressed with a clear topic, proper words andcoherent structures, which students are evidently not up to. Therefore, it is a high priorityto improve the teaching of English writing in order to enhance students’ writing ability.Researches on metaphor can be dated back to the time of Aristotle in ancient Greece,who believed metaphor was a rhetorical device. Halliday is the first linguist who not onlyproposed the term grammatical metaphor, but also illustrated it in details from theperspective of functional grammar, which has extended the research scope of metaphor.Based on the three meta-functions, Halliday categorized two types of grammaticalmetaphor: ideational and interpersonal. Ideational grammatical metaphor is related to theideational function of language. It concerns with transitivity in Functional Grammar. If atransitivity analysis does not reflect adequately the state of affairs being referred to, it isvery likely that the meaning is being expressed metaphorically.College students tend to use simple sentences with little variation in sentence patterns.If ideational metaphor can be adopted in EFL writing, such problems might be solved andstudents writing can be more fluent and coherent. Therefore, this research tentativelyapplies ideational metaphor in the EFL writing in college, and tries to answer thefollowing questions: (1) Is there a correlation between the use of ideational grammatical metaphor andcoherence in students’ writing?(2) How do English teachers apply the knowledge of IGM into EFL writing in classroom?Based on the research questions, an experimental class (EC) and a control class (CC)were chosen to take part in this study, including a pre-test, an experiment and a post-test.In the pre-test, it was concluded that the scores of the compositions and the use of IGMbear no significant differences between CG and EG. The experiment lasted for threemonths, in which a five steps teaching approach of IGM was adopted, namely,warming-up activities, explicit teaching, handouts distribution, awareness-raising tasksand follow-up practice. After this, the subjects took the post-test, in which, subjects in EGhad a better performance than CG, and the scores of the two groups were significantlydifferent. Then Pearson correlation showed that the use of IGM and the scores ofcompositions in EG were positively correlated, indicating that the use of IGM did have apositive effect on the coherence of students’ compositions.Therefore, applying IGM into the teaching of EFL writing is effective on theimprovement of the coherence of students’ compositions.