| "Coherence" generally refers to the relationships that link the ideas in a text to create meaning for the readers. It has often been considered as a vague and complicated concept. In spite of the complex nature of coherence, it has aroused great interest among the linguists and writing researchers. Currently, there are mainly two different orientations in the study of coherence: text-based and reader-based. Some linguists claimed that it is the writer who constructs and orders the information in the first place. In this sense, coherence can thus be defined as a feature of the text. However, more recent psychological and pragmatic researches have suggested that coherence is not irrelevant to the reader's interpretation and that it depends on successful interaction between the reader and the text. In other words, the text and the readers both have a role to play in the construction of coherence.Considerable amount of research has been conducted on the issue of coherence over the past few decades, there are, however, few theories proposed that can be practically applied to the teaching of writing in terms of improving coherence in students compositions.For the two reasons mentioned above, this paper has taken coherence as a research issue and aims at improving student writing through using the concepts of the Given-new Contract and Topical Structure Analysis as tools to revise the draft. The Given-new Contract, also known as the known-new contract, refers to a linguistic phenomenon that most often the given information is found at the beginning of a sentence, while the new tends to follow afterwards, and the new information of a sentence often becomes the given of the subsequent sentence. Topical Structure Analysis refers to the study of topical development in a text by examining semantic relationships between sentence topics and the discourse topic.It has been proved by previous studies that in English, the given information tends to occur before the new information and the Given-new Contract conforms to the expectation of the reader, enabling the reader to process information more efficiently from sentence to sentence and creating reader-based coherence. In this sense, the contract can well connect the information between sentences and establish local coherence as a result. Nevertheless, a coherent text requires coherence not only at the sentence level but also at the text level. For this reason, Topical Structure Analysis is adopted to investigate the topical development of a whole text by employing three major topical progressions: parallel, sequential and extended parallel.The primary focus of the present paper is to find and analyze the various devices that can help to keep the Given-new Contract for realization of coherence at the sentence level. It also aims at verifying the topical progression proposed by earlier scholars and accounting for the varied topical progression used in different texts.For such research purpose, the present paper focuses on the discussion of devices at two levels: lexical and syntactic. Lexical devices include repetition, referential pronouns, substitution, conjunction and words of other semantic relations. Syntactic devices include passivization, cleft-sentences and propositional phrases. The paper also elaborates on the specific use of topical progressions, such as parallel, sequential, extended parallel and extended sequential progression in different types of writing.Through the analysis of the specific devices to maintain the Given-new Contract and the discussion of the use of topical progression in different types of writing, the present study has verified the effective use of these two tools. Moreover, it has further explored their applications to the EFL writing and provides a new perspective to the studies of teaching writing. |
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