An Action Research On The Effects Of Using Conjunctions In English Writing For Senior Middle School Students

Nowadays English writing plays a more and more important role in the university entrance examinations, in which English writing accounts for40points. But writing is one of the most difficult courses for most students, and the teaching of writing is relatively ineffective. Conjunctions, an important tool to make the context coherent in writing, have drawn more and more attention from researchers at home and abroad. Many researchers have studied the differences in the use of conjunctions between English learners and its native speakers, explored the kind of conjunctions favored by the learners in China, and studied on the misuse of conjunctions by college students. But few of them have made a detailed study on the use of conjunctions by senior middle school students.The New English Curriculum Standards (2003) pointed out that writing is playing a more and more important role in English teaching. Students are required to achieve different English levels. Students of senior middle schools must reach level eight when they graduate, that is, students should be able to:write complete, cohesive and coherent articles; narrate or express their own views and attitudes; write a summary according to a piece of given reading material. The requirements mentioned above on senior middle school students have emphasized the improvement of students’writing ability through cohesion theory. But in actual teaching, English teachers tend to teach students language points and grammatical structures, which makes the writing teaching ignored invisibly. Therefore, writing teaching has seriously lagged behind in foreign language teaching, resulting in a phenomenon that students are upset and teachers feel headaches by writing.This study aims to strengthen teachers’awareness of the importance of conjunctions and cultivate students’awareness of using conjunctions in order to promote language teaching and learning. In this thesis, the author puts forward two questions:1) Are the frequency and the types of conjunctions used by students in high-mark group higher and more than those of the students in low-mark group?2) Can teachers help students improve the ability of using conjunctions and make their writings cohesive?Based on cohesion theory and action research, the thesis adopts a questionnaire and two writings (pre-test and post-test) as instruments. What’s more, the author adopts the experimental teaching to strengthen the students’ability of using conjunctions to make writing more coherent after the pre-test. The author conducts them to see whether there are differences in grasping conjunctions by students of different levels and whether the training of conjunctions has positive effect on writing quality. The aim of the questionnaire conducted before the writing is to test the students’learning strategies and problems in English writing. In addition, the author selected some samples to classify them into the high-mark group and the low-mark group and compared the differences in the frequency, variety and misuse of conjunctions between the two groups. Finally, the author collected and analyzed the results and data of the two writings to see whether the students’writing ability had improved. Through the experiment, we found it effective and useful to improve students’writing ability by training their ability to use conjunctions to make their writing coherent.