Cohesion Theory And Its Implications For The Teaching Of English Writing In China

English writing is one of the five basic language skills and it is an indispensable link in second language teaching. But English writing in our country does not receive enough attention. Too much stress is placed on grammar while integrated trainings are ignored. Therefore, students are over-sensitive to grammar, syntactic structure and the spelling of words and they often ignore the cohesion of sentences. Consequently, the whole text is intermittent, without a clear main idea. Thus, how to achieve better results in English teaching and how to develop students' writing competence remains an arduous task for English teachers.In the past decades, English writing researches have been carried out at home and abroad by many scholars and have received good results, but few of the studies have gained satisfying effects when applied to the teaching process. Some integrated methods in China, though still in their trial stage, did solve some problems of students' writing; however, problems of coherence among students' writings still remain. The cause lies in students' lack of awareness of texture and the knowledge of cohesion theory.Cohesion is an important terminology in text linguistics and the publication of Cohesion in English (1976) co-authored by Halliday and Hasan is a symbol of the establishment of cohesion theory. According to Halliday and Hasan, cohesion is of great importance in coherence and is critical for the creation of texture. Since 1976, a number of researchers and experts form home and abroad have pushed ahead greatly the cohesion theory. Nevertheless, few studies on Chinese students' English writings concerning cohesion theory have been accomplished. So this paper is intended to explore the importance and necessity of applying cohesion theory to improving the texture of Chinese students' compositions and the teaching of college English writing.With the participation of 187 second-year college students who are English majors, the author extracts some samples of students' writing with lexicogrammatical cohesive problems, and then analyzes the problems with reference to lexicogrammatical cohesive strategies and Error Analysis.The major findings include: wide spread of cohesive errors, the positive effect of cohesion theory to English writing quality, i.e. the high-scored compositions contain more cohesive devices and fewer errors of these ties while the low-scored compositions contain less cohesive devices and more errors. Possible reasons are also probed including the poor linguistic competence and the influence of negative transfer of Chinese, but the root lies in students' weak sense of texture in writing. Based on the major findings, the author discusses the necessity and feasibility of integrating cohesion theory into the teaching of English writing. Some implications and suggestions are put forward on how to carry out the integrated approach.Through the analysis, research and tentative study, the author makes a conclusion that the integration of cohesion theory into English writing is both necessary and feasible. However, there are still some limitations of this paper. Since the size of corpus is very small and it is confined to only one university, the findings may not be representative enough. It is hoped that this paper may shed light on any further research about the integration of cohesion theory and English writing.