A Study On The Application Of Cohesion Theory To The English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

English writing, one of the important forms of language communication, plays an important role in English learning. However, the current situation of students’ English writing is barely satisfactory. How to effectively teach English writing becomes an urgent problem to be solved. The traditional writing teaching method emphasized the teaching of grammar and vocabulary, but ignored to cultivate students’ consciousness of cohesion and coherence in the discourse level.Halliday first proposed the concept of “cohesion” in 1962, and he jointly published cohesion in English with Hasan in 1976, which marked the establishment of the cohesion theory. Since then, its application in writing teaching has always attracted researchers’ attention both abroad and at home. However, the review of the former researchers’ study leads to the fact that the participants mainly focus on college students. Therefore, based on the cohesion theory by Halliday, the current study takes the senior high school students as the participants, and inquires into the influence of cohesion theory on the students’ English writing competence in senior high schools.This study goes from the following aspects:First, can the writing teaching based on the cohesion theory reduce anxiety in English writing of senior high school students? If so, among classroom teaching anxiety, conception anxiety, avoidance behavior and self-confidence anxiety, which anxiety is significantly reduced?Second, can the writing teaching based on the cohesion theory improve the writing competence of senior high school students?The author conducted a four-month research in Changtu No.2 Senior High School of Tieling, Liaoning Province. 64 students in two classes(experimental class and control class) were randomly selected from Grade One as the participants. During the experiment, the experimental class was taught writing teaching method based on the cohesion theory, while the control class the traditional writing teaching method. In this experiment, three research instruments including questionnaire, tests and an interview were employed to make the quantitative and qualitative research of the questions, and all the data were analyzed by SPSS 17.0.The analysis results indicate as follow:First, the writing teaching method based on the cohesion theory has an positive effect on reducing students’ anxiety in English writing, especially it has significant effect in relieving students’ self-confidence anxiety. After the training, most of the students are not afraid of English writing tasks as before, and they are not nervous when writing English compositions in a limited time. Most importantly, their confidence in writing is significantly improved.Second, the writing teaching method based on the cohesion theory improves students’ writing achievements, which indicates that their writing proficiency is promoted.To sum up, students benefit a lot from the training of cohesion theory to reduce their writing anxiety and improve their writing ability, thus it is effective and feasible to apply the cohesion theory to English writing teaching in senior high school. Besides, the current study provides some enlightenment and references for both teaching and learning in senior high school.