An Empirical Study On The Application Of Cohesion Theory To English Paragraph Writing Teaching In Senior High School

The promulgation and implementation of the National English Curriculum Standard for Senior High School indicate that in China,the reform of English Curriculum in primary education has entered a new development period.In the classroom teaching,the phenomenon that the teachers focus more on grammar,sentence structures and exam skill which influenced by exam-oriented education is gradually changing.In recent years,with the deepening reform of English Curriculum in senior high school,the training of listening,speaking,reading and writing in senior high school has been strengthened.However,relatively speaking,writing is not optimistic.Through observation and analysis of students' compositions and related researches,the author finds that there are problems like weak textual awareness,a lack of cohesion,unreasonable use of transitional words in students' writings and so on.Therefore,the content of writing is not coherent,the text awareness is weak,and the structure is loose.In the environment of deepening reform of the education system and the development of the core attainment of students,it is necessary to strengthen teaching and training of English writing.Previous studies pay more attention to the training of the whole text,so that the training cannot achieve obvious results in a short period.Therefore,the author focuses on paragraph writing,applying the cohesion theory to paragraph writing,through the paragraph writing training to improve students' writing competence.The publication of the Cohesion in English,co-authored by systemic functional linguistics Halliday and Hasan,marks the foundation of cohesion theory.Over the years,cohesion theory has been developed for the theory model that can be applied in stylistics,translation science,and foreign language teaching,etc..This research seeks to introduce cohesion theory to English paragraph writing class teaching in senior high school,and to improve students' writing competence by the combination of cohesion theory and senior high school English paragraph writing.The research questions are as the follows:1.Can the application of cohesion theory to English paragraph writing improve students' paragraph writing awareness?2.Can the application of cohesion theory to English paragraph writing improve the students' writing scores?In order to respond to the above research questions,the teaching experiment has been carried out for sixteen weeks.The subjects were seventy students from two classes of grade two.Through the pre-test,the students' English writing ability of the two classes do not have the significant difference.The experimental instruments include questionnaires,tests,interviews and SPSS data analysis software.After the teaching experiment,the author collects data.Through data analysis,we can draw the following conclusions: First,the application of cohesion theory to senior high school English paragraph writing teaching can improve students' paragraph writing awareness,the students' paragraph awareness is significantly enhanced.Second,the application of cohesion theory to senior high school English paragraph writing teaching can improve students' English writing score.And through the cohesion training,students' writing competence is improved.In a word,this study proves that the application of cohesion theory to senior high school English paragraph writing teaching can improve students' English paragraph writing awareness and writing scores.