A Study Of The Application Of Cohesion And Coherence Devices In College English Writing

Since1976, the professors of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Hallidayand Hasan wrote a book together, which is called Cohesion in English. In this book,the two authors see cohesion as something decoding the implication of the discourse,and presenting readable or interpretable linguistic materials. They stresses that bothcohesion and coherence are essential to make the linguistic material well understood,thus the writing or utterance of language becomes meaningful. Two authors identifiedfive general categories of cohesive devices in this book. They are reference,substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. In the field of discourseanalysis, Halliday and Hasan made significant contributions to the development ofcohesion device by means of studying cohesion and coherence.Based on the requirements of syllabus of college English teaching, collegestudents should learn such five basic skills as listening, speaking, writing andtranslating during their college life. Although almost all the colleges and universitieshave realized and emphasized the importance of English learning capability and theymade a great efforts to help students to learn English toward this object, students stillhave a lot of difficulties and meet challenges in learning English well. In spite of theirhaving a large number of vocabulary and learn English grammar well, they can stillnot write English compositions well. According to the survey conducted by scholars,whether the devices of both discourse cohesion and coherence are chosen and usedwell are two important problems existing in college students’ English writing.Thus, an attempt to correct students’ mistakes in their composition must be madeby their teachers and students themselves, the purpose of which is to enhancestudents’ writing ability, to make students able to express their ideas freely and clearly.This research is based on the theory of Halliday and Hasan’s text linguistics. To test whether the students can use the device of cohesion and coherence well in collegeEnglish writing, a group of students are selected by the author as testees in theexperiment. The author gives a test of the students’ writing ability before theexperiment. Then the author introduces them the devices of cohesion and coherenceand ask them to do some exercises to learn this to use devices still fully. The resultsreveal of this experiment that after students’ exercises in this aspect for a period oftime, students can construct a kind of text frame in their minds, which is helpful inimproving their writing ability. That is to say, the devices of coherence and cohesionreally play very important role in improving students’ writing ability.The present study intends to adopt the method of combing theory and practice toanalyze this thesis. This thesis is made up of the following five chapter. Chapter Oneis an introduction of the background, research questions, and the significance of study.Chapter Two is a literature review, including an introduction of some basic concepts,the current situations of cohesion and coherence both at home and abroad. ChapterThree mainly talked about the research methodology, will design an experiment incomposition by surveying the two groups, experimental group and control group.Chapter Four shows the data analysis and discussion. Chapter Five summarizes thestudy major findings and the limitations of this thesis.