The Role Of Cohesion And Coherence Knowledge In Retelling Stories

Discourse analysis has been maturating day by day. Many theories of discourse analysis have been used in foreign language teaching. The combination of discourse analysis and foreign language teaching not only opens a new research field for scholars, but offers a new way to the problems in traditional foreign language teaching. It is the theory of cohesion and coherence that is of the greatest influence on foreign language teaching. As for the relation between cohesion and coherence, different scholars have different opinions. But they generally accept that cohesion and coherence are dependent on each other. Cohesive relationships within a text are set up "where the interpretation of some element in the discourse is dependent on that of another. The one presupposes the other in the sense that it cannot be effectively decoded except by recourse to it".(Halliday & Hasan: 1976). Coherence lies in concepts and relations underlying the surface text and concerns the continuity of senses.In 1995, spoken English test began to be administered in Test for English Majors- Grade Four, of which one item requires the students to retell the story they have just heard, that is, story-retelling. After years of research, scholars have found that students often meet with some discourse problems in the process of retelling. Can these problems be solved? The writer finds out that their solution may be worked out by imparting the cohesion and coherence knowledge. Here are two research questions:(1) Will the teaching of cohesion and coherence affect students' performance in story retelling?(2) If it is true, will the influence be different to students with different proficiencies?To explore these issues, two research methods are employed. They are interview and testing. The purpose of interviewing is to understand students' subjective elements, so as to adjust the experiment. To be scientific and accurate, testing is used to quantify the experiment results. The 26 subjects are from a natural class of the second-year English majors of College of Humanities and Law, Taiyuan University of Technology. Before the testing, the subjects were grouped into: the proficient and the less proficient, according to their scores of Intensive Reading of last term. During the experiment, the subject sat a story retelling test first, which was scored by two teachers and was recorded. After analyzing their marks and transcripts, the writer imparted cohesion and coherence knowledge to the subjects. After the training, the subject takes another retelling test similar to the previous one, different in content, of course. The scores and transcripts constitute the data of this research.The statistical correlation tests and the independent sample t-tests were adopted in this research to analyze the scores collected in the experiments.The experiment results suggest that the teaching of cohesion and coherence knowledge has a great effect on the performance of story retelling, no matter whether the subjects are proficient or not. Furthermore, the higher the proficiency is, the more significant the effect is.Based on the researcher, the writer suggests that it is necessary to inculcate the students with the cohesion and coherence knowledge in the teaching of story retelling. Considering the wash-back effect, the writer also proposes that the evaluation of the discourse knowledge should be added in the marking standard of spoken English test of TEM 4 in future.