An Experimental Study Of The English Continuation Task Of Senior High School From The Perspective Of The Theory Of Discourse Cohesion

Since the 1960 s,there have been more and more systematic and in-depth studies on discourse cohesion at home and abroad.At the same time,the application of discourse cohesion theory in foreign language teaching is increasing.However,few studies have combined the theory with English teaching at the high school level,especially with the reform of the new college entrance examination in China.The English examination has been greatly adjusted,and the continual writing has been added to the paper,which poses a great challenge to students and high school English teachers.Although a lot of researches have been done in this area,there are still few researchers who applied the theory of discourse cohesion to guide this form of writing,resulting in the lack of theoretical knowledge for high school English teachers and the lack of internal logic in the essays written by students.Therefore,the problem of how to improve students’ ability of writing cohesive articles has become an urgent issue.As a result,based on Halliday and Hasan’s discourse cohesion theory,this study will explore the following three questions.1.What are the existing means of discourse cohesion in high school student’s continual writing?2.In which aspects high school students promote the cohesive awareness of continuation task after applying discourse cohesion.3.In which aspects high school students promote the writing skills of continuation task after applying discourse cohesion.This study used questionnaires,experimental and comparative methods in quantitative analysis and classroom observation in qualitative analysis to compile and explain the existing means of discourse cohesion in continual writing of high school students and the comparative experiment of applying discourse cohesion theory to the teaching training of continual writing.Firstly,I used a questionnaire to investigate the current situation of the students’ using cohesive methods in continual writing in six classes of three different grades in my high school,and summarized the students’ performance in daily teaching in conjunction with classroom observation.Finally,the experimental data were presented and clarified using the comparison of quantitative analysis.The following are what the results of the study indicate.Firstly,the students perform poorly in applying discourse cohesion in continuation task,and some of them may use some easy references and lexical reiteration of lexical cohesion.However,these students even misused them.Owing to the limited time during the English exam,there are only 40 minutes left when students get down to finishing the continuation task.Because it takes 10 minutes to analyze the given text and outline the main plot they will write,there are only 30 minutes left.The majority of students will not use ellipsis and substitution in their writing.For teachers,who are under a lot of pressure from the school and family,most of them only focus on teaching vocabulary,grammar,sentence structure and other linguistic issues,but pay little attention to the cohesion of the writing,especially the teaching of how to use ellipsis and substitution,resulting in students’ writing with poor internal logic and fluency.Secondly,the application of the cohesion theory to the training of continual writing can improve the quality of students’ writing to a certain extent,especially improving the awareness of using lexical cohesion and grammar cohesion,but it will not promote significant improvement of continual writing ability,which is,after all,a comprehensive and long-term process.However,it is instructive to apply the cohesion theory to the training of continual writing.Finally,this application of the cohesion theory to continual writing effectively improved students’ cohesion skills.After 17 weeks of systematic training,the students had a better command of understanding and using different ways of discourse cohesion,especially in the application of lexical cohesion,reference,substitution,ellipsis and conjunction which showed that the application of the theory to writing could improve the discourse cohesion ability in high school.Therefore,this study aims to improve the coherence of students’ compositions through the intake of certain knowledge of discourse cohesion in the context of the New College Entrance Examination as well as the awareness of using reference,substitution,ellipsis and conjunction in their writing.At last,I hope it will reduce the burden of teachers by providing them with relevant theoretical references.