Textual Function Of Cohesion In The Process Of Foreign Language Learning

This paper draws on the concepts of coherence, cohesion and information to probe methods to boost college students'capacity to read and write in English. The materials are three texts and a large number of errors collected from the translations by 240 non-English majors.The main reason for the errors is that the students are just concerned with the meaning of each single word or phrase without bothering to consider the text as a unified whole. To solve the problem, the paper provides a way out by combining the notion of coherence with that of information structure to help the students learn to analyze a text sentence by sentence to build up their text awareness. On such a basis, the paper also recommends that college students should be familiar with the five cohesive devices. An applicable method is that only one of the five cohesion relations is discussed at a time when one is analyzing a text before a comprehensive description is unfolded.Another difficulty that the paper concerns is that there exist obvious differences in cohesive devices between Chinese students and Anglo-American counterparts. To help bridge the gap, the paper introduces a method of selecting a specific type of cohesion by combining cohesion with informitivity. The producer may upgrade or downgrade the informitivity in accordance with the readers'world knowledge and expectation while contemplating which type of cohesion relation to choose.The conclusion is that it is necessary to train college students to conceive a text as an integrated one and then to introduce the five cohesive devices in a practical way.