A Study On The Problem Of The Discourse Cohesion And Its Countermeasures For Non-English Major Students In English Writing

As one of the five major skills in English,English writing plays an important role in English learning.The use of cohesive devices in English writing also can not be ignored in the successful English writing.Based on the theory of cohesion by Halliday and Hassan,this study makes a research on non-English major students to analyze the problems in discourse cohesions by using corpus method,interview method and text analysis method.In the beginning,according to the main problems existed in students' writing,this study focuses on analyzing the connection and the use of lexical cohesion.There are three questions to be researched in this paper.First,the use of English lexical cohesion and conjunction by the subjects are analyzed.Second,some reasons about the use of connection and lexical cohesion in English writing are analyzed.At last,according to the results of the analysis,some countermeasures are put forward in the final part of this paper in order to improve the cohesion of English writing.Next,it is concluded that there are some problems in the connection of English writing and the use of lexical cohesion.This paper discussed those problems from two aspects including problems on the conjunction and problems on the lexical cohesion.In the conjunction,there exist three problems.First,Non-English majors have less familiarity with the semantics of conjunctions.Second,the phenomenon of less use,missing use and leakage use about the conjunction are serious in the English writing.At last,it is usually unitary to use the conjunction and subjects generally use fixed conjunction templates to constitute the textual cohesion.Likewise,there are also three problems in the lexical cohesion including the excessive use of the same type about the vocabulary,the inappropriate use of the hyponymy and the mistakes in the vocabulary collocation.This paper analyzed those problems in the use of conjunction and lexical cohesion,and the researcher has found some reasons in the process of study as well.First,the subjects couldn't understand the usage and meaning of conjunction.Second,the cognitive pattern of native language influences the use of conjunction and lexical cohesion,especially the negative transfer of the mother tongue.At last,the subjects are lack of the lexical cohesion awareness.Finally,based on those problems discussed in the research,some countermeasures to improve the cohesion in English writing are put forward as follows.First,Teachers should comprehensively explain the knowledge of cohesive devices to students in the class.Second,Teachers should strengthen the training of writing cohesion in the teaching process.Last but not the least,students need to improve their emphasis on the cohesion in English writing actively.Though this thesis may have some shortcomings,it would be helpful to the instruction and learning of English writing.In the last part of this paper,the defects are discussed and the future works are put forward as well.