A Survey On Cohesion And Coherence In Continuation Writing Task Of Senior High School Students

The continuation task became a new question type for the college entrance examination in Zhejiang Province in 2016.Then the relevant teaching of the continuation task has been integrated into high school English teaching across China,and many education researchers have also begun to study the continuation task.Unlike previous propositional writing,continuation task requires students to pay more attention to cohesion of the text and the coherence of the context in the writing.At present,discourse cohesion and coherence have not attracted enough attention from high school teachers and students since they still focus on word spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.Based on the status quo,this research mainly investigates two major issues with the rationale of cohesion and coherence.The specific research questions are:What is the teaching status quo of discourse cohesion and coherence in the continuation tasks of high school?2.What are the differences in cohesive devices used in the continuation tasks written by the high school learners with different English proficiency?3.What are the differences in coherence in the continuation tasks of high school learners with different English proficiency?This study is conducted by means of questionnaires for understanding the current situation of cohesion and coherence teaching in continuation task and the students’ writing experience,writing habits,as well as interviews,which is employed to investigate the use of textual cohesion and coherence in continuation task by high school English learners with different language proficiency.More crucially,the students’ writings are analyzed with the help of the online text analysis of Coh-Metrix.After statistical analysis of all the data,it is found that: First,there are some problems in teachers’ teaching strategies and teaching focus of discourse cohesion and coherence in continuation task.Second,high school learners of different English levels have significant differences in the use of some cohesive mechanisms in continuation task.The more proficient the students are in English,the better use of cohesive devices there are in their continuation tasks.Third,high school learners with different English proficiency also have significant differences in discourse coherence in continuation task.High-level students have the most prominent performance in the three dimensions of logical coherence,overall coherence and discourse coherence,followed by the intermediate group.Although the low-level group has higher quantitative indicators of logical coherence,it still has a certain gap between the other two groups.Finally,the author puts forward feasible suggestions for the teacher’s teaching and the student’s learning about the cohesion and coherence of the continuation task.