A Study On Cohesion Devices In Discourse Homework

The training of students’expressive ability in passage is highly emphasized in advanced Chinese teaching. Teachers always require students to express their opinions in a complete paragraph rather than some single sentences. Such aim can also be reflected in exercises since many of them are in the form of discourse, which are often designed to improve students’expressive ability in passage. Among all those related elements of passage expression, cohesion, which is regarded as a most important device to connect sentences, should always be laid much emphasis on. Therefore, it matters whether cohesion has been paid attention by teachers when they design exercises.In order to find out the answer, we have studied the 3rd year and 4th year Chinese homework in CIEE. First, we inspected the passages written by the students and have found that many cohesive devices are wrongly used, including reference, substitute and ellipsis, lexical device and logical connection, etc. The students have made mistakes in all these devices but the teachers, however, usually turn a blind eye to such kind of errors, which indicates that Chinese teachers pay little attention to cohesive devices.Then, we observed the homework from the prospective of exercise designing. We found that although there are quite a lot different types of discourse exercises in the assignment, the trainings on reference, substitute and ellipsis are very few. More exercises on lexical cohesive devices and logical connections can be found but there are also some problems, including the improper ways to use the two devices in the settings of the exercises which mislead the students to follow.According to the problems above, we have put forward some suggestions and strategies in teaching. For example we can let the students correct their improper expressions so as to practice cohesive devices, or adapt the texts into discourse analysis exercises, etc. We hope our study can provide the Chinese teachers with some idea and meanwhile, draw their attention to the teaching of cohesive devices especially in the design and setting of Chinese homework, and thereby, improve the students’ ability of cohesion and discourse expression.