The Application Of Cohesion Theory To Senior Middle School English Teaching Of Writing

Written expression is an important test content in English entrance examination questions. It is mainly to study the candidates'ability to express their ideas in English. That is to say, if they can use the English language knowledge that they have learned and the English expressions in accordance with the habitual usages to transmit information and exchange ideas. However, in practice teaching, We discovered that writing is one of the most difficult skills for students to master. Faced with a variety of mistakes when checking the students'compositions, teachers sometimes also feel at a loss and wonder what to start with. There exist surface syntax errors as well as cohesion and coherence problems. Therefore, we distributed the questionnaires to the students of Grade Two in Yang Zheng Senior Middle School as well as the teachers of foreign language group. We want to know the writing strategies and habits of students when writing and the teacher's guidance to writing. From the results of the questionnaires, are seen many problems in high school English writing teaching. For example: students paying more attention to sentence grammar and ignoring the text, laying emphasis on vocabulary rather than cohesion. In a word, teachers and students did not give enough attention to cohesion, so the overall writing level in high school is not high.Cohesion and coherence are very important notions in discourse analysis. Since Halliday and Hasan published Cohesion in English in 1976, a growing number of linguistics have applied it to discourse analysis. In this chapter, we take Halliday and Hasan's theory as the theoretical basis of investigating the influence of the teaching of cohesion devices on the quality of the compositions written by senior students in China. We put forward three hypotheses to do an empirical research: (1) a systematic instrument on cohesion devices can help students to improve their writing skills; the students who receive the training on textual cohesion will perform better than non-trained students. (2) the number of cohesion devices in good writing is greater than the number in bad writing.(3)of all the subcategories of cohesion devices, conjunction and lexical cohesion make the greatest contribution to the quality of writing.Before the experiment, two classes (experimental group and control group ) know little about cohesion. And then I carried out the experiment. I only gave the general knowledge and explanation about cohesion to the experimental group for about a semester, while in the control group, I only taught writing in conventional ways. The two classes all completed a total of 8 pieces of writing (including the pre-test and post -test).The result of SPSS11.5 shows that: the writing performance has improved in experimental class, thus demonstrating that the application of cohesion to writing has achieved good effect. In order to verify the assumption 2and 3, we collected the 30 essays in post-test written by the experimental group .We divided the essays into two groups (good writing and bad writing )according to the grades they got. We counted the number of all the cohesion devices and the number of each cohesion device in each essay. The hypothesis we made at the beginning could be justified again.In general, the teaching of cohesive devices enhances the awareness of using cohesion device in students'writing and the fluency and coherence at the same time. And also improves the students'writing ability .Finally, the thesis comes to a conclusion about the experiment, makes some suggestions about the teaching of English writing, and explains some limitations in the study.