A Study Of Cohesive Devices And Thematic Progression Patterns In The English Practical Writing By Senior High School Students

Writing is a manifestation of comprehensive language ability,and it is also one of the difficult skills for English learners to master.As one of the key items examined in the National College Entrance Examination,English practical writing is widely used in real life.Without successfully mastering it,people may face difficulties in international communication.Therefore,it is of great practical significance to carry out research on practical English teaching to improve students’ comprehensive quality in English practical writing.However,the status quo of English practical writing in senior three is far from satisfactory.In actual English practical writing,it can be found that although students have learned and mastered a certain amount of English vocabulary and cohesive devices,there are still some problems,such as ambiguous reference,a lack of flexibility and variety in sentence patterns,as well as incoherence in compositions.Hence,how to improve their English practical writing remains one of the urgent problems to be solved.The coherence among sentences and within a text cannot be guaranteed by cohesive devices alone.It is also important to pay attention to the choice of theme and the arrangement of thematic progression patterns in order to make the transmission of information natural and smooth.Therefore,based on the textual function of Systemic Functional Grammar,this paper aims to observe the writing situation of high school students from cohesive devices,thematic choice,and thematic progression patterns.This research aims to answer the following three questions:(1)Compared with model essays,what are the current situations of the use of cohesive devices in Chinese high school students’ practical writings? What are the differences? What are the causes for the differences?(2)Compared with model essays,what are the situations of the use of theme and thematic progression patterns in Chinese high school students’ practical writings? What are the differences? What are the causes for the differences?(3)What are the pedagogical implications? Taking senior high school students of one high school in Shandong Province as the main subjects,this paper chooses 60 random samples from a parallel class and at the same time uses 60 practical essays in an essay reference book published by Beijing Education Press as reference.Firstly,the samples are organized and saved as two plain text files to build two small monolingual corpora and then comes the revision of the samples.Then,the use of cohesive devices is marked,and the number of cohesive devices is counted by combining the functions of Concordance,Collocates,and Word List in Ant Conc with manual marking.After that,theme/rheme and thematic progression patterns are manually marked and the data is collected.Finally,the collected data is analyzed through SPSS to understand the differences between them in detail.This paper studies the causes for the differences and problems existing in students’ essays through quantitative and qualitative research method,and then the improved methods are discussed so as to contribute to the study of English writing teaching.Through analysis,it is found that:(1)In terms of cohesive devices,the total number of cohesive devices in students’ compositions is very close to that in model essays.Three kinds of cohesive devices are employed in students’ compositions:reference,conjunction,and lexical cohesion.Among them,lexical cohesion is the most frequently used one,and reference is the least.All cohesive devices are applied in model essays,among which,conjunctions occupy the dominant position,while ellipsis and substitutions are seldom applied.In the comparative study on the use of specific devices,the problems in students’ compositions are presented as following:the first one is the reference,which is manifested in two aspects: ambiguous reference and overuse or even abuse of the definite article “the”.The second one is the overuse of conjunctions and poor vocabulary.In model essays,the writers tend to choose words with concrete meanings.On the contrary,students tend to use conjunctions as much as possible and always choose some broad words.The third one is that students overuse simple repetition;According to the author’s analysis,the reasons for the above problems focus on the following aspects: firstly,students do not have a systematic understanding and mastery of cohesive devices;secondly,the lack of vocabulary and negative transfer of native language;finally,to avoid making mistakes,they adopt the “avoidance” strategy in writing.(2)As far as the theme choice is concerned,all types of the theme can be found in model and students’ essays.In students’ compositions,the type of theme is simple.The rate of the simple theme is much higher than that of multiple and clausal themes.Whereas in model essays,the distribution of each theme is relatively even.The rate of the simple theme is the highest,followed by multiple and clausal themes.And the rate of the simple theme is the highest.Concerning the use of thematic progression patterns,all four thematic progression patterns are used in students’ compositions,but each pattern’s use frequency is quite different.Among them,the constant theme progression and paratactic progression are more used than the other two.In model essays,the distribution of the four patterns is relatively even and reasonable.The main problems are as follows: firstly,the type of theme is simple and the overuse of the simple theme.Secondly,the thematic progression pattern is single.Thirdly,overuse or misuse of constant theme progression and paratactic progression.Finally,the thematic progression pattern is somewhat chaotic and has no fixed rules.According to the author’s communication with the teacher and the analysis of students’ compositions,the causes for the above problems are concentrated in the following aspects: firstly,negative transfer of native language.Secondly,influence of the genre.Thirdly,students have not learned related knowledge of theme/rheme and TP patterns,which leads to their lack of awareness of using TP patterns to organize their compositions.(3)Given the above problems,the author put forward a model of English practical writing teaching and some implications with specific teaching steps to provide practical guidance for English teaching.Teachers should 1)teach and train the use of cohesive devices and thematic structure systematically based on the problems existing in students’ essays;2)combine reading with writing and consolidate the teaching and practice of cohesive devices and thematic structure through reading;3)encourage students to explain English words in English and expand their vocabulary through different tasks;4)gradually integrate theme/rheme and TP patterns into English writing teaching through different tasks;5)give full play to the role of evaluation in promoting student learning;6)use Pikai.com and other modern information technology to help students polish their essays.There are still some shortcomings in this paper.This paper only studies practical writing and does not involve other types of writing.Further studies can explore the cohesion and coherence of other types of senior high school students’ English writing to provide more practical guidance for senior high school teachers’ composition teaching.