A Study On L2 Argumentative Writing Coherence From The Perspective Of Xu Theory

Nowadays,discourse coherence is a common problem in learners’ L2 writing.It is of great importance to study coherence because it is an important measure of writing quality.Wang Chuming(2016)proposed Xu theory,arguing that:(1)Language is learned through continuation;(2)High learning efficiency is achieved through continuation.Continuation task is a form of Xu theory,and has been proved to be effective in improving learners’ foreign language learning efficiency and their L2 writing coherence.However,it has not been discussed in depth how to improve L2 writing coherence by the continuation task.This study is under the guidance of Xu theory and the discourse coherence theory proposed by Zhang Delu and Liu Rushan(2003),and puts forward a teaching method combining the continuation task with the discourse coherence theory(hereinafter referred to as the combination method).This method is applied to the argumentative writing teaching to study the influence of this method on improving L2 argumentative writing coherence.In this study,a first-year non-English major class from an independent college was selected as the participants.The teaching experiment of argumentative continuation task lasted for 16 weeks.This study mainly answers the following three questions.(1)What is the effect of the combination method on content coherence and linguistic coherence of L2 argumentative writing?(2)What is the participants’ attitude towards the combination method after using it?(3)How is the combination method adopted to achieve better teaching effect?Data collection and analysis were divided into three parts.The first was to collect the continuation completed by the participants and analyze the changes for feedback.The second was to collect the essays in the pre-test and the post-test,adopt the text analysis tool Coh-Metrix to obtain the writing coherence data,and then carry out the paired sample t-test by SPSS to analyze the changes of coherence.The third was to sort out and analyze the questionnaire and interview results in the pre-test and the post-test to understand participants’ attitude towards the combination method.The results show that:(1)the combination method can improve content creativity and syntactic complexity.(2)This method is helpful to improve the content coherence and linguistic coherence in L2 argumentative writing.(3)Through questionnaire survey and interview,it is found that after the experiment,the participants have a deeper understanding of writing coherence and discourse coherence theory,and hold a positive attitude towards the combination method.(4)The effective implementation of the combination method can be carried out from five aspects: 1)understanding participants’ writing level;2)choosing argumentative essays with simple content and topics which are close to campus life as teaching templates;3)emphasizing on the teaching methods of combining theory with practice;4)paying attention to the teaching from the surface to the depth;5)gving feedback in time and correcting mistakes in continuation essays.This study has verified the validity of the combination method.In the future argumentative writing teaching,teachers can adopt this method to guide students to practice continuation task,which can effectively improve students’ writing coherence and writing quality.