A Study On The Application Of Cohesive Devices To English Writing In Junior High School

As an important part of English teaching,writing English is an indispensable part of foreign language teaching.Writing,however,has become the focus on teaching.Students can only read and say so it is difficult for teachers to teach in writing.When they actually apply what they have learned to writing,it is becoming a big problem to learn English.With the reform of teaching objectives in recent years,more and more teachers have realized the importance of English writing in ELT.But in practical teaching,students in junior high school know little about the knowledge of how to use cohesive devices in writing.Teachers and students only pay attention to grammatical structure,spelling and number of words.As a result,students do not make a good foundation for learning English writing.Therefore,improving students' understanding and using of cohesive devices has become a key task in teaching.Since Halliday and Hasan put forword the theory of cohesion in 1976,more and more scholars begin to study the role and status of cohesion theory and cohesive devices in discourse.So,the paper is based on the theory of Halliday's cohesion and uses the method of experiment to study the relationship between the application of cohesive devices in English writing and the improvement of students' writing ability.The following two research questions are presented:1.Do cohesive devices increase the students' interest in English writing after experiment?2.After the experiment,to what extent did the students improve their English writing through the application of cohesive devices to the teaching of writing?First,for the above two research questions,the author carried on a four-month teaching experiment in Junior Eight of Xin Cheng Middle School in the city of Donggang,Liaoning Provice.The students who participated in this experiment were two classes with approximately the same level of English writing,with a total of 64 people.The first class was the control class that adopted traditional writing.Another experimental class adopted a new approach that based on cohesive devices.The experimental data were collected by means of tests,questionnaires and interviews.Secondly,through data analysis,it is found that the students have not only changed their attitude toward writing,but also increase their interest in writing.The most important discovery is that the application of cohesive devices to writing can greatly improve the quality of English writing and test results.Finally,the application of cohesive devices has significant advantages in stimulating students' interest in writing and learning.It can enhance the continuity and fluency of Language as well.It has a great influence on the quality of writing to which cohesive devices can be applied.Based on the results of this experiment the author puts forward the limitations of the experiment and gives some suggestions for improving English writing.