A Study On The Use Of Cohesive Devices In Teaching English Writing In Senior High School

Listening, speaking, reading and writing are four basic skills for a good language learner, especially the importance of writing is obviously to see. English writing is an important component to test a proficient English writer’s ability. English writing ability is always regarded as the core of English teaching. What’s more, it is also a major branch of second language acquisition. In NMET, English writing is also an important part of the test. Therefore, scholars pay much attention to the English writing. According to English writing, the scholar can predict the learner’s ability, such as thinking pattern, expressing ability. The author, however, find that English writing become the most difficult part for students for its comprehensiveness. The senior high school teachers also have no better way to instruct students. The author realize that grammatical and lexical mistakes are the surface of writing quality, what’s more, the most important problem is that lacking cohesion and coherence consciousness. To have a better understanding of students’ writing, the author handed out the questionnaire to the students in Wuhai No.1 Senior High School. It is a pity that there is still a deviation in writing teaching. For example, both teachers and students stress vocabulary and grammar rather than cohesion and coherence of the discourse. All in all, these factors lead to the low writing quality.Halliday and Hason(1976) stress the importance of cohesion and coherence in Cohesion in English. So many scholars combine this theory with discourse analysis. The theoretical basis of this thesis is relied on Halliday and Hason’s Cohesion Device Theory. Furthermore, the author investigates the relationship between Cohesion Device and writing quality.The author chooses two paralleled classes in Grade 1 as the subjects, one is experimental class(EC) and the other is controlled class(CC), which are all from Wuhai No.1 Senior High School. Before experiment, the students from these classes knew little about cohesion knowledge. The standard of English performance is at the same level. Meanwhile, according to the pre-test, the students’ writing quality was at the same level. During this semester, the teacher instructs the cohesion knowledge in EC while the traditional writing method was still adopted in CC. After a semester’s instruction, the final exam writing was regarded as the post-test. Author would collect the result of post test scores. According to the data analysis, the marks in EC have an obvious development while the CC did not show improvement. The students’ writing quality in EC made a great progress in many aspects, such as cohesion and coherence.To sum up, the author points out the limitations and further study of the thesis and raises some suggestions about application of Cohesion Device in senior high schools.