A Study On The Effects Of Clause Relation Analysis Teaching On Coherence In English Writing In Junior Middle School

As one of the basic skills of English,writing plays a significant role in English learning.However,it can be found that although there are no obvious language errors in students’ writings,the coherence of the writing is less satisfactory.It is mainly manifested in the improper use of cohesive devices,incomplete structure and incoherence between paragraphs or sentences.The clause relation is the basis of text construction.As one of the important theories of discourse analysis,the clause relation theory can not only analyze the logical relation between clauses at the micro level,but also explore the deep structure of the discourse at macro level.Based on clause relation theory,this research intends to apply clause relation analysis in writing teaching to explore the effects of clause relation analysis on junior middle school students’ writing coherence.The research questions are as follows:(1)What effects does clause relation analysis in writing teaching have on the students’ writing performance?(2)What are the changes in the degree of coherence in students’ writings?(3)Have students’ attitudes towards writing coherence changed? If so,what kind of changes are they?The three-month teaching experiment was conducted in a public middle school in Hangzhou,Zhejiang Province,with 80 students from the two parallel classes in Grade 8 as the research participants.The experimental class employed clause relation analysis in writing teaching while the control class employed the traditional writing teaching.In this research,writing tests,questionnaires and interviews were taken as the main research instruments.The collected data was analyzed in Coh-Metrix 3.0 and SPSS 26.0,and the major findings are as follows:(1)The application of clause relation analysis in English writing teaching is effective in improving the writing ability of junior middle school students,especially on the structure of writing.(2)Clause relation analysis teaching can promote local and global coherence in junior middle school students’ English writing,especially in the indices of the adjacent argument overlap,adjacent stem overlap,LSA(Latent Semantic Analysis)between adjacent sentences and LSA sentence all.(3)Students’ attitudes towards coherence in writing have changed,which is reflected in that students can attach more importance to the overall structure of the writing,consider the semantic connections between sentences and use different cohesive devices to improve the coherence of writing.According to the above findings,the research drew the following pedagogical implications.Firstly,teachers should integrate the explanation and training of some discourse coherence knowledge and skills into English teaching.Secondly,teachers should focus on the coherence of clause relations and also strengthen the accuracy of language and integrity of content in clause relation teaching.Thirdly,teachers should make full use of the model essays.Fourthly,teachers should develop students’ ability to think in English.Fifthly,teachers should play the role of evaluation timely and precisely in English writing teaching.