A Research On College English Writing Coherence Under The Guidance Of Cohesion Theory

As one of the basic skills in language, writing is of great importance in Englishteaching. However, in China, besides the problems in grammar and spelling,compositions of university students are weak in the text-organization, fluency andlogicality. The traditional approach in writing instruction only emphasizes thecorrect use of grammar and spelling. Therefore, in order to find a new method toimprove students’ writing, the author conducts an experiment to apply Halliday’scohesion theory to the language teaching to investigate whether introducingcohesive devices can help improve students’ writing coherence. Based on the abovepurpose, this research tries to answer the following three questions:1. What kinds of features exist in the use of cohesive devices in students’ writing?2. How to use the cohesive devices to improve the coherence of English writingeffectively?To solve the three questions mentioned above, this study selected two classesin Shenyang normal university, one is major of math, and the other is major ofChinese. The author choose the class of math as the experiment class, and choosethe class of Chinese as the control class. For the experiment class, the author did atraining of cohesive devices (reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction andlexical cohesion). After the training, we use the software of SPSS to analysis thecompositions of the two classes, and we has the following findings:1. More different cohesive ties are used by the students in the experimental classthan the students in the control class in the posttest. In the compositions of theexperimental class, the number of synonyms or near synonyms grows noticeably,and the number of personal reference and repetition drops sharply. After training,the students of the experimental class have less cohesion errors in the posttestcomposition; there are still many lexical cohesion errors in their compositions,this shows that the teachers need to pay more attention to this part in teaching.2. After cohesive training, subjects use more cohesive devices and commit fewererrors in their English writings, which show that their awareness of usingcohesive devices and their coherence of English writing are improved by cohesive training.The paper comes to the conclusion that proper use of cohesive devicescontributes to the coherence of English writing and that all the cohesive devices canbe mastered by training. Therefore, it is necessary for both teachers and EFLlearners to pay more attention to the relationship between cohesion and Englishwriting so as to strengthen the awareness of using cohesive devices. Besides,systematic training with exercises on the use of cohesive devices and more writingpractice are of certain extent to the improvement of English writing coherence ofnon-English majors.