On Writing In Senior High School:From The Perspective Of Cohesion

It is of great importance to develop the students' writing ability in FLT because it reflects whether the students have transformed what he learned into his ability of using English. How to improve the students' ability of writing has remained a problem unsolved in FLT. Teachers all know that writing is important while they find it hard to correct the students' composition, not only because of the various mistakes in language points but also because of the misuses of cohesion. There are always such mistakes in their compositions as confusing reference;ambiguity meaning;redundant words or wrong sentences;misuse of substitution and ellipsis;fragmentary and uncohesive sentences;lack of long and complex sentences;misuse of conjunctions;wrong collocation;misuse of repetition, synonym, antonym;etc.Obviously, it's the teachers' responsibility to instruct the students how to use them. This thesis is exactly based on how to solve these cohesion problems found in the high school students' compositions. The thesis firstly reviews the research of cohesion at home and abroad with emphasis laid on the theory of Halliday & Hasan. Then, it discusses the necessity of the present research based on the changes in the latest standard Teaching Curriculum. Next, it analyzes the cohesion mistakes in students' composition from the perspective of grammar cohesion and lexical cohesion.In order to find out the students' weak points in using cohesion, a research was done in 186 students from 3 classes of Senior One in Zibo Experimental High School. From the 1860 compositions (ten times), notes of mistakes in cohesion were made. 30 papers were selected and an analysis of the rate of different cohesion mistakes concerning reference, ellipsis, substitution, conjunction, etc. was made.According to the analysis, a conclusion is drawn that there are more grammar cohesion mistakes than lexical ones in student's compositions, so to strengthen the learning of grammar plays an important role in improving the students' writing ability. It is also found that the lexical learning should be focused on collocation, thus, memory work is a must in the later process of FLT. In this thesis, three causes leading to cohesion mistakes are presented. Firstly, the negative transfers of the students' mother tongue mislead them to make mistakes in cohesion. Secondly, the affectionalfactors, such as anxiety, depression, self-esteem and motive, may have great negative influence on the students' writing. Thirdly, the lack of cohesion concept makes it hard for them to use cohesive devices consciously.For the negative transfer the teachers should highlight the differences in cohesion between English and Chinese. For the lack of cohesion concept and affectional factors, the teachers should make the students understand the use of cohesive devices in the textbook, and if necessary, ask them to recite the whole text and make them remember as many connectives as possible.In view of these causes, the thesis proposes some strategies. Besides, the teachers should also make efforts to remove the mental obstacles on the part of students, and get them fully motivated in their writing.