Textuality And English Writing Teaching

In the areas of second language acquisition research and foreign language learning and teaching, people always emphasize the five basic skills -listening, speaking, reading, and writing, and translating. Many teachers and students think that among the five, producing a coherent, fluent and extended piece of writing is the most difficult task. It is the skill even some native speakers never master. For second or foreign language learners the challenges are much more enormous.The purpose of this research is to apply the approaches and methodology in theories of textuality and discourse analysis. Writing is a form of communication between the writer and the audience. A piece of writing may be regarded as a carrier of information. Unlike spoken discourse, which is context dependent, usually relies heavily on the shared knowledge between the interactants and often makes reference to the shared actions, written language is context-independent, having the disadvantage of exposing decoder's own feelings and of having to speak clearly and concisely and make immediate response to whichever way his reader reacts. The key point of doing so is to know how to make the text coherent or acceptable. In order to be understood, a text needs a lot of cohesive ties both within and without.So far, many linguists home and abroad have studied text theories and proposed many useful methods to guide scientifically our teaching and assessments of students' English writing. In the first chapter, the author of the thesis does a brief review of these theories of text. At the beginning of the chapter, several definitions of text and textuality are given. Then come the components of textuality (seven standards of text)put forward by de Beaugrande and Dressier (1981)-cohesion, coherence,intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality, and intertextuality. But the thesis mainly describes in detail five of them, i.e. cohesion, coherence, intentionality, informativity, and situationality because they are closely related to writing practice. The discussion of the relationship between text theories and writing practice comes at...