A Case Study On Cohesion And Coherence In English Expository Writing Practice

English writing has always been considered as the most difficult among the four language skills of listening,speaking,reading and writing in second language teaching and learning.Moreover,it is an important criterion used for assessing an English learner’s comprehensive language proficiency.For Chinese English learners,their toughest writing problem does not lie in grammatical errors,but in lack of coherence between sentences or even of the whole text.Although most English learners can write their compositions in line with the requirements of words and grammar,most of their writings lack structural integrality and coherence between sentences or paragraphs.Therefore,it is a huge challenge for them to produce a well-organized and coherent essay.With the publication of Halliday and Hasan’s book Cohesion in English in 1976,cohesion theory came into being,and then cohesion and coherence became two non-ignorable concepts in the field of discourse analysis.Halliday and Hasan explicitly point out that cohesion is the foundation of coherence and plays a very important role in text development.Coherence is a crucial prerequisite for creating the text.Many language teachers and researchers have applied cohesion theory to the teaching of college English writing and scored some achievements.However,most of them have focused on non-English majors in China.Hence,based on the cohesion theory and the findings of previous studies as well as the definition of coherence suggested by Widdowson,the present research will analyze some common errors of cohesion and coherence in the writings of 73 sophomores of English majors and explore the possible causes of these errors.This research aims to enhance Chinese English learners’ awareness of correct and appropriate use of cohesive devices in their English writing and offer some useful suggestions on the future teaching of English writing in China.The author of this paper attempts to answer the following two research questions:(1)What are the common errors of cohesion and coherence in the English majors’ writings?(2)What are the possible causes of these errors?In order to find the answers to the two research questions,the author collected and analyzed the data,conducted a questionnaire and an interview.First,a quantitative analysis of cohesive errors is conducted in the randomly-selected73 compositions written by 73 English majors in Donghua University.With the help of cohesion theory put forward by Halliday and Hasan,the frequency of three cohesive devices(reference,conjunction and lexical cohesion),the number of the related cohesion errors and the rate of each cohesion error are respectively calculated.Then,a qualitative and quantitative analysis is made to illustrate the features of some cohesion errors and to explore the possible causes of these cohesion and coherence errors.The questionnaire conducted on the 73 subjects of the research aims to help the author have a good understanding of these students’ knowledge of cohesion and coherence,their use of cohesive devices and writing habits.The interview for the teacher who has been teaching English writing for more than 20 years is designed to learn about the teacher’s opinion on the common errors of cohesion and coherence in the hope of helping the author to identify the possible causes of these errors in a more comprehensive way.The findings of the study indicate that the cohesion and coherence errors English majors commit in their writings are very common.The reference error accounts for the highest percentage,followed by conjunction error and lexical cohesion error.Misuse,under-use or inappropriate use of the former two cohesive devices in most compositions has a negative influence on the textual coherence.In addition,lack of coherence in some English writings can be attributed to lack of logical connection between sentences.Finally,the author discusses the possible causes of these errors: the influence of situational context,difference between English and Chinese,students’ previous learning experiences,their relatively low English proficiency and she demonstrates that each error students commit is not caused by a single reason.It is suggested that Chinese English teachers should put emphasis on covert coherence errors apart from overt cohesion errors in their future teaching of writing.Besides,teachers need to develop students’ English way of thinking and cultivate their ability of organizing a text and intensify the practice of cohesion and coherence in various ways so as to help their students achieve textual coherence and produce high-quality compositions.