A Study On The Application Of Grammatical Cohesion To English Writing In Senior High School

Language skills,including listening,speaking,reading,viewing and writing,are an important part of language performance ability.And students' comprehensive ability of choosing words,making sentences and layout is always examined in high school English writing.Among them,cohesion and coherence are important factors for the success of writing.While in high school English writing teaching,both of them are not paid enough attention to,which leads to poor writing quality.Thus,this study is undertaken by applying grammatical cohesion devices to senior high school English writing teaching to promote students' output of cohesive discourse and improve the writing quality.Based on the theory of Halliday and Hasan's discourse cohesion and Corder's error analysis theory,combined with the relevant research results,this study focuses on the following issues from four grammatical cohesion categories: reference,substitution,ellipsis and conjunctions:(1)What effects does the application of grammatical cohesion have on the quantity and types of grammatical cohesion in high school students' English writing?(2)What effects does the application of grammatical cohesion have on the high school students' English writing performance?The subjects of the study were the students from two Senior Three classes with similar English proficiency in one senior high school in Yueyang.In the experimental class,the teaching and training of grammatical cohesion were introduced,while in the control class,the traditional product approach was adopted.During the 16-week experiment,the author conducted questionnaires,writing tests and interviews in the experimental class.After the experiment,the author used SPSS23.0 to analyze the data and found out the number of grammatical cohesive devices used by students in the experimental class increased significantly,in which the conjunction increased the most,followed by the reference,substitution and ellipsis rarely changed.In addition,the usage of types of each subclass of conjunctions varied obviously.Then,the author also drew a conclusion that the scores of the experimental class are higher than that of the control class.In addition,there are obvious differences between the scores of both classes,which shows the application of grammatical cohesion has a positive impact on the improvement of writing performance.So it is proposed that the grammatical cohesion devices be applied in English writing teaching.