The Study On The Improvement Of Students’ Ability Of Coherence And Cohesion In College English Writing

Based on the theories of Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion types, Martin’s identification and Hasan’s classification of nominal group, this study tries to use a new method (practicing writing with corpus-based approach) to improve students’ ability of coherence and cohesion in college English writing. Yet, it should be made clear that the two theories; i.e. the mentioned above cohesion types and identification in discourse system, have both similarity and difference. The similarity is a semantic concept and the main difference is a semantic concept in the level of sentence-based and text-based and reference. Coherence and cohesion are regarded as an important part in teaching college students English writing. However, there are many problems such as ignorance of coherence, cohesion and smoothness in writing. Thus, it is necessary for teachers to improve students’ ability in writing. The objective of this study is to use corpus in training students’ writing through the application of identification and classification of nominal group so as to improve students’ ability of coherence and cohesion in college English writing.Corpus-based approach, which combines with conventional writing teaching approach, is used in this study to establish a new model of English writing teaching. The subject in this study is thirty sophomore students majoring in science and engineering (n=30). The experiment for trying the new model of English writing teaching lasts for six months. In order to increase the reliability and validity, the data are collected through pre-test, post-test and questionnaire by corpus-based approach to testify them and analyzed statistically through the significant difference between the two tests quantitatively and qualitatively. At last, SPSS is used to obtain the quantitative results.The results show that there is a significant difference between pre-test and post-test in college English writing. It indicates that identification and classification of nominal group in cohesion plays an important role in improving the students’ ability of coherence and cohesion in college English writing. That is to say, the noun clusters and the classification of nominal group correlate with writing scores in corpus. It indicates further that the theory of identification and classification of nominal group influences students’ ability of coherence and cohesion in college English writing. Although there is a limitation in this study, this thesis provides some suggestions for further research.