A Study Of Coherence And Cohesion In The English Writing By Senior High School Students

In the process of English teaching,the training of writing plays an important role.Writing reflects students? output ability.Cohesion and coherence are important factors that affect the quality of composition.Exploring the current situation of cohesion and coherence in students? compositions can prompt teachers to discover the problems of cohesion and coherence in students? writing and attach importance to the cultivation of this ability.This study is based on the theory of text cohesion and coherence,and takes the students of Grade 2 in Wuhan No.6 Senior High School as the research object.Through corpus analysis and interview,the cohesion and coherence of senior high school students? English writing are investigated and studied from both paragraph coherence and the use of cohesive devices.The paper is intended to answer the following questions through research:1.How the paragraph coherence is used in senior high school students? English compositions and what are the mistakes in cohesive devices in their English compositions?2.How do senior high school students use the three types of cohesive devices and what is the usual wrong use of cohesive devices in their English compositions?3.What are the factors that undermine the correct usage of cohesion and coherence in senior high school students? English writing?Through corpus analysis,data statistics and interviews,this study finds that for the paragraph coherence of students? compositions,most students can highlight the paragraph theme and elaborate closely on the theme when writing.However,students still need to strengthen the orderliness and logicality of paragraph construction.Secondly,very few students write paragraph topic sentences.As for the use of students? textual cohesive devices,the main findings of the study are as follows:(1)Students? use of three types of grammatical cohesive devices is unevenly distributed: rare use of ellipsis and substitution;(2)The most prominent problems in grammatical cohesive devices are unclear personal reference and excessive use of the second person;(3)Students? use of six kinds of lexical cohesive devices is unevenly distributed: excessive use of simple repetition and complex repetition;(4)The students? choice of conjunction is simplistic;(5)Absence and misuse of conjunction is the most prominent problems in using logical conjunctions.The above findings and interview results indicate that the negative transfer of mother tongue and teachers? neglect of text cohesion and coherence knowledge input result in the problems with cohesion and coherence of students? compositions.The paper puts forward three pieces of advice for teachers: Teachers explain the knowledge of text cohesion and coherence through English-Chinese comparison;Teachers strengthen students? awareness of using cohesion and coherence through erroneous demonstration of model texts.Teachers should increase the training of applying text coherence and cohesive devices.