A Study On Application Of Textual Cohesion Theory To Senior High School English Writing Teaching

Textual Cohesion plays an important role in students’ English writing.The Cohesive Devices is an important guarantee for the fluency and coherence of the composition.But there are some problems in students’ English writing.Firstly,the reference used in the composition is always confused and the meaning is vague.Second,students do not know how to use the appropriate conjunctions to express various relations between sentences,such as cause and effect,space and time,addition and transition.What’s more,words and sentences are often used incorrectly,they usually can not use repetition,synonyms,antonyms,etc in a right way.As for the English writing correction,teachers mostly pay attention to the content of writing,vocabulary and grammatical errors,and seldom pay attention to the cohesion and coherence of text.The New Curriculum Standard in 2017 clearly proposes the use of Textual Cohesion to improve the coherence of expression.Therefore,in order to solve the problems above,the author considers to apply the theory of Textual Cohesion to high school English writing teaching.With reference to the results of the literature review about Textual Cohesion at home and abroad.The author applies Cohesive Devices based on Halliday and Hassan’s Cohesion Theory to senior high school English writing classes to explore the influence of Cohesive Devices on high school English writing by the following four research questions.1.What are the present situations of senior high school English writing teaching and learning?2.What are the current situations of application of Cohesive Devices to senior high school English writing teaching and learning?3.Do students have awareness of using Cohesive Devices in their English writing after the teaching of Cohesive Devices?4.What are the differences in the use of Cohesive Devices between high-proficiency and low-proficiency students?Data of this thesis are collected from 70 students in Class 5 and Class 10 of Grade 2 at Long Quanyi No.2 middle school in Chengdu through classroom observation,questionnaire,pre-test,post-test and individual interview.And the data are analyzed and processed by Excel and SPSS,and the conclusions are presented in the following four aspects:(1)Some students are interested in writing,but they are not satisfied with their writing.In English writing,teachers pay more attention to process writing and they always regard correcting grammar,vocabulary and writing contents as the most important task but ignore discourse structure.Students have many difficulties in English writing and one of the biggest problems is lacking textual knowledge.(2)Students have the awareness to use Cohesive Devices in English writing,but they often make mistakes and lack systematic knowledge of Cohesive Devices.(3)After teaching the two classes by means of Cohesive Devices,it can be seen that the students’ awareness of using Cohesive Devices in their writing has been significantly improved,and the students of class 10(experimental class)have made greater progress than those of class 5(parallel class).(4)Students are more inclined to use references,conjunctive,compound and collocation in writing,and rarely use substitution and ellipsis.