| Discourse is to transfer text messages. The key to understanding discourse lies in how to separate the author's messages from the textural organization. Therefore, from a macro perspective, readers need to seek for the author's ideas and the changes of the ideas with the help of lexical devices which are called discourse markers. Usually different themes and genres of articles possess different organizational forms that help accelerate discourse comprehension as well as speed up discourse processing. These two functions complement each other. Taking written discourse as an example, we may find grasping and memorizing more lexical phrases can reduce the efforts in word choices because these lexical phrases together with some discourse markers can build the discourse frame. So getting familiar with the meanings, forms and functions of the phrases can not only speed up discourse comprehension but also contribute to the coherence of discourse both in terms of content and structure while discourse is being processed. This study is aimed at cultivating the students'awareness of comprehending and constructing discourses organized by the functional phrases, and improving the students'writing coherence. It hopes to provide an effective approach to enhance writing ability.The main body of the paper is divided into five chapters.Chapter One aims to provide a clear introduction to the background and significance of the action research.Chapter Two intends to lend theoretical supports. The relative theories are:1) discourse analysis theory2) lexical approach3) practice effects, etc.Chapter Three first identifies the research questions:1) Can teaching reading texts organized by functional phrases cultivate students'awareness of accumulating lexical phrases and their awareness of comprehending and constructing discourses with the functional phrases?2) Will teaching reading texts organized by functional phrases have a positive effect on improving senior high school students'composition coherence? Then an action plan is implemented. In this research, in order to explore a new method of improving students' writing quality through the bridge of "lexical phrases" between language input and output, the researcher adopts teaching of lexical phrases into discourse comprehension while guiding the learners to have quick comprehension of the texts and then assist the learners to learn, internalize and intake the lexical phrases through a series of exercises so that they can be applied in writing.Chapter Four presents the research results and discussions through manual statistical instrument and percentage calculation. The following results can be achieved:1) The statistics of pre-test and post-test questionnaires evidently prove that the teaching model can effectively cultivate students' awareness of accumulating lexical phrases and their awareness of comprehending and constructing discourses with the functional phrases.2) The statistic of pre-test and post-test compositions proves that the frequency of misuse, overuse and underuse of functional phrases has been reduced and the frequency of correct use has increased. Moreover, the students tend to use more topic-related phrases. According to Miller (1956), chunking quantities of information into one message can increase the amount of information that working memory need to handle. The more information working memory can handle, the more complex (McCutchen Perfetti1982) and coherent (Bereite&Scardamalia1987) the articles will be. Therefore, the teaching model has a positive effect on improving senior high school students' composition coherence.Chapter five offers some suggestions based on the findings. Firstly, better strategies of how to effectively help students input and consolidate various lexical phrases need to be studied and discussed. Finally, to better test the students' lexical phrases application in their compositions, teachers may choose compositions of the same genre or the same topic in pre-test and post-test. |
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