A Study Of Teaching English Writing In Middle School Based On The Theories Of Coherence And Cohesion

Writing,as one of the four basic skills of English learning,has an important role in English teaching.In recent years,the level of English writing of middle school students has improved with fewer grammatical or spelling errors.However,there are still many problems in their writings,such as unclear subject,incomplete structure and incoherent discourse(Zhang,2013).Discourse Analysis(DA)was first proposed by Zellig S.Harris,an American structuralist,in his book Structural Linguistics in 1951.It analyzes the genre,pattern and style of discourse from a macro point of view and analyzes the coherence and cohesion between paragraphs and sentences from a micro perspective.This study tries to apply the theories of coherence and cohesion in discourse analysis from the macro and micro perspectives to the teaching of English writing in a middle school,in order to improve the students' writing ability through arousing their discourse awareness.Meanwhile the thesis provides practical teaching methods of English writing in the classroom of middle school in China.In this experiment,the author applies questionnaires,interviews and tests as research instruments and selects 58 students of Grade Eight from two classes and 10 teachers from different Grades in a middle school as participants.Before the experiment,the teachers of the school are interviewed and the experimental students are required to finish a questionnaire,with the purpose to find out the existing problems of English writing of the middle school students and the main reasons for the problems.The results of the interview and the questionnaire show that there is a connection between the existing problems in English writing of middle school interview and the questionnaire,a 12-week teaching experiment is carried out in the English classroom of the middle school.In Experimental Class,the students receive the relevant knowledge and training of coherence and cohesion,while in Control Class;the students receive the traditional teaching method.After the experiment,the collected data are analyzed through Excel 2011 and SPSS.23 and the results of the analysis are discussed.Meanwhile,according to the results of the interview,the implications are mentioned at the end of the paper to give teachers and students some suggestions to improve students' writing ability.The results show that the problems of English writing of middle school students mainly lie in coherence and cohesion.With the DA teaching method,the students start to notice coherence and cohesion,write the topic sentences,apply different cohesive devices to their English writings and establish discourse awareness.The experiment proves the feasibility of applying DA method to the teaching of English writing in middle schools to establish students' discourse awareness and improve their writing ability of coherence and cohesion.Meanwhile,it also provides practical teaching strategies for middle school teachers in English teaching.