The Application Of Cohesion And Coherence Theory In Middle School English Writing Teaching

Writing is the content of education and the means of teaching in English teaching of middle school. Recently, more and more teachers have realized the important role of writing in English language teaching. The trend seems to have been reinforced by the new writing objectives in the newly promulgated Senior High School English Curriculum Criterion and new marking criteria of NMET. Though various good teaching methods have appeared, students and teachers have made strenuous efforts, which achieves little effect on the improvement of the students'writing, particularly on the problem how to achieve coherence in the writing. In this case, this thesis aims at approaching teaching strategies of English writing from the angles of cohesion and coherence, by means of literature, questionnaire and experiment.First, the thesis gives a brief review of the studies on theories of foreign language writing in China. This review focuses on the articles published in the most important periodicals of foreign language teaching and research since the 1980s. In order to get an overall understanding of the theories, two aspects basic theories of foreign language writing and theories of teaching foreign language writing are discussed.Second, the thesis discusses the different interpretations of cohesion and coherence and the relationship between them. Most coherent discourses also being cohesive do not imply that coherence is created by cohesion. Nevertheless, discourses are reflected by formal features after all, and the only way to study coherence from the point of formal features is through analyzing cohesive mechanisms of discourses. In senior high school English writing teaching, cohesion serves as a good way to achieve coherence and it interacts with coherence rather than stands separately from coherence.Third, this thesis analyses the current state of present students'writing in senior middle school, pointing out that students pay too much attention to words and grammar but too little to coherence. And a detailed analysis of various causes resulting in such a state is also presented. Also according to the curriculum criteria, it illustrates the necessity of students'ability to make their compositions coherent.Then in correction with the reality of writing teaching in middle schools, this thesis provides a training experiment on how to help students achieve coherence in their writing by means of cohesive devices. The subjects are 126 students in senior two from an ordinary high school in Shandong province. During four months'instructional intervention, the teacher provided lectures and training of cohesion and coherence to students in the experimental class. At the end of training, a questionnaire is administered to the subjects to obtain feedback about it. The data of students'final exam scores and writing scores, and the average language error scores on cohesive devices both in experimental and control class were collected with the help of SPSS 13.0. The research results prove that the training carried out is successful. It not only improves students'awareness of coherence but also makes their compositions more coherent.This thesis tries to provide teachers and students with operating example with the aid of cohesion and coherence theories by illustrating examples and practice. It is hoped that English writing of middle school will be on its way to stepping into textual level, and cohesion and coherence of discourses will be paid more attention to.