The Application Of Cohesive Devices To English Writing In Senior High School

In English learning process,writing which mainly reflects the students’ ability to organize their thoughts and express themselves occupies an important proportion in the College Entrance Examination and other kinds of English examinations.However,writing is the most difficult part in most high school students’ English learning,and it is also a relatively weak link in high school English teaching.In addition to the surface errors such as grammar and spelling,the current high school students’ English composition often has problems in the aspect of discourse cohesion.For example,logic between sentences is not correct and the structure of the compositions is loose and not compact.The traditional teaching mode only pays attention to the error correction of grammar and word spelling,and can not solve the above problems fundamentally.In order to help high school students improve the coherence of their English compositions,and prompt the students’ cohesion level and scores in English writing.This research aims to explore the impact of cohesive devices teaching on students’ cohesion level in English writing and students’ cohesion awareness,and raises the following two questions.1)Can students improve their cohesion level through the writing teaching of cohesive devices?2)Can writing teaching of cohesive devices enhance students’ cohesion awareness?This research is based on the clause relations theory and cooperative learning theory.It chose80 students from a senior high school in Tianshui City.The entire teaching experiment process lasted for eight weeks.The process of teaching experiment adopts the process approach and the experimental class(Class5,grade2)and control class(C1ass6,grade2)were taught the same contents except that the experimental class adopts the cohesive devices.They also finished the same number of writing exercise based on the same topic.Moreover,the writing paper were rated by veteran and experienced teachers in the school,on the basis of rating scale of writing in College Entrance Examination.This research used three research methods,writing tests,questionnaires and interview.The SPSS software was used to analyze the data of pre-test and post-test to explore whether the the cohesive devices teaching can help students improve their cohesion level in English writing.At the same time,two questionnaire and interviews were used toexplore the change of high school students’ cohesion awareness in English writing.The results show that in the pretest,the difference of the cohesion level in English writing between the two classes’ students is not obvious,but after the treatment,the cohesion level and quality of English writing in experimental class’ students are higher.At the same time,the cohesion awareness of experimental class students is obviously stronger than the students in the control class.In the end of this paper,the author hope that this research can provide some inspiration to teachers’ writing teaching and students’ English writing.Due to the relatively short duration of the teaching experiments in this research and the relatively small number of samples collected,further research is needed based on this issue.