A Study Of College Students' Ability In Using Cohesive Devices In English Writing

An ultimate goal of college English teaching is to cultivate students' comprehensive ability in using the language.English writing,as a productive skill,can not only reflects students' professional English knowledge and ability to use it well,but also reflects students' critical thinking ability,in which cohesion and coherence is one of an important indicator and criterion to consider the quality of a composition.The current study,which is based on the results of previous study of the cohesion theory applied in English writing,aims to investigate and cultivate non-English majors' awareness of cohesion and coherence,as well as improve their abilities to use cohesive devices in English writing.As an empirical study,it is guided by cohesion theory of Halliday and Hasan,and three questions are addressed:1.Can the cohesive training raise college students' awareness of cohesion and coherence?2.After the training,can college students use cohesive devices in their writing properly?3.Can the cohesive training improve students' English writing proficiency?The research subjects involved are two classes(80 sophomore students)of educational technology majors in Xinlian College,Henan Normal University.The two classes of similar writing proficiency,taught by the same teacher,were randomly assigned as the experimental class(EC)and the control class(CC).A 14-week systematic cohesive training was adopted in EC.In order to ensure the reliability and validity of the experiment,quantitative and qualitative methods were used.The data of questionnaire,the scripts and the scores of pre-test are analyzed quantitatively by the SPSS software to get a general understanding and specific details about the problem of cohesive use in college non-English major's English writing.The results are as follows: College non-English majors' awareness of cohesion and coherence is not optimistic and worrisome.On one hand,students focus more on grammar and vocabulary compared with text cohesion.On the other hand,the input of cohesion theory is not enough for college students.Consequently,for the misuse of cohesive devices,students' compositions are redundant with run-on sentences,loose in structure and lack of coherence.Systematic training improved non-English majors' awareness of cohesion and coherence,as well as the ability of using the various cohesive devices properly and effectively.In addition,the cohesive training applied in English writing helped college non-English majors gradually master the skills of language using and thinking.At the end of the research,the enlightenment of cohesion theory to English writing teaching are discussed.Besides,the limitation of the experiment as well as the orientation for further study were pointed out by the author.