| Higher vocational education aims to provide talented people who have practical knowledge, techniques and skills to serve in the front line of production, management, and service. On the premise of employment-oriented, vocational college English teaching should not only improve students'basic knowledge and skills of English , but also it should have effective training for students of practical English reading , translation and practical English writing. In recent years, with the rapid development of our country's foreign trade, the number and scope of foreign trade increased greatly. Written communication in English is more and more frequent and important. To further enhance students'employment competition and professional accomplishment, teachers should pay much more attention to improve students'practical writing performance.The English writing of vocational college non-English majors is at a relatively low level. Through investigation, the author has found the following problems existing in their writing: Firstly, there are the improper word repetition, dull expressions and disordered sentences. Secondly, during the writing and writing evaluation, the teachers and students often put emphasis on the correction of grammatical mistakes and misspelled words within the sentences. Thirdly, there are either few or incorrect uses of cohesive ties in the writing. Cohesion theory, as part of systemic-function, has been studied widely by many linguists and educators. It was found that cohesion and coherence are essential factors contributing to successful writing. Previous relevant studies just made static analysis on the cohesive features of students'narrative, expository and argumentative writing. But few studies made statistic analysis on practical writing. In view of the limitations of previous studies and particularity of vocational college non-English major students, the author attempts to testify whether the application of cohesion theory in practical writing teaching can improve the students'practical writing quality, and to find out the relationship between the use of cohesive devices and writing quality.At the beginning of this thesis, the author introduces the background, analyzes the problems existing in vocational college non-English major students'writing and reviews some previous studies. On the basis of analyzing the previous relevant research, the author proposes the purpose of this study.The author discusses the relationship between text and cohesion, cohesion and coherence, and elaborates Halliday and Hasans'(1976) taxonomy of cohesive devices. After a full discussion on the theoretical basis of the present study, the following hypotheses are put forward: (1) The teaching of cohesive devices can help students improve their practical writing performance; (2) the use of conjunction and lexical devices is closely correlated with the quality of their practical writing.Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used to analyze the use of cohesive devices in the practical compositions written by the two classes of Auto Inspection and Maintenance Major from Rizhao Polytechnic. The author first carried out a pretest before the training. Then after two term's cohesive ties training, a posttest was given for the two classes. And finally, the data of the pretest and posttest were collected and analyzed. The analysis was based on Halliday and Hasans'(1976) framework of the taxonomy of cohesive devices. And the SPSS 16.0 was used to do the calculations. The result after the training testified our hypothesis and it also showed that there was significance difference between the pretest and posttest. The incorrect use of cohesive ties was also analyzed in this paper, and the result is that there appeared more cohesive ties after the training, and there was less incorrect use of these cohesive markers. Finally, the paper stressed that during English teaching, more emphasis should be put on cohesive devices training in order to improve vocational college students'practical writing competence. |
PDF Full Text Request