A Study Of Connectives In Senior High School English Practical Writing

Among the five skills of English language learning,writing has always been considered to be the most difficult to master.In practical writing,it is a great challenge for most English learners,especially high school students,to write good articles with rigorous structure,rich content and smooth language.Many students simply piled up sentences in practical writing,and the structure they used in the article is loose.They ignored the importance of connectives for cohesion.Therefore,this study is based on the practical writing(report)of the 2020 college entrance examination Shandong paper as the test.Guided by cohesion theory,this study collected the writings of the 102 students in Grade 2and built a corpus,and then all connectives in the corpus were analyzed by ANTCONC software,which aims to explore the use characteristics of connectives in students’ practical writings with the help of text analysis method.SPSS software was used to analyze the students’ questionnaires.At the same time,six teachers in senior two were interviewed with the help of the interview outline.The factors affecting students’ use of connectives were explored by the combination of questionnaire method and interview method.This study expects to improve students’ discourse awareness and practical writing quality in daily teaching.Accordingly,the research questions raised are:1.What are the characteristics of connectives used in practical writing in senior two?2.What are the factors affecting the use of connectives in practical writing?Through the analysis of corpus,questionnaire and the teacher interview,this study finds that:1.In this study,the distribution of students’ use of connectives is uneven and the richness is not enough.Some students have the phenomenon of overuse and misuse of connectives.2.This study found that the characteristics of connectives are affected by many factors:students’ attitudes toward practical writing;students’ transformation of English-Chinese thinking modes;students’ awareness and ability of using connectives;teachers’ guidance on students’ practical writing in and after class.Based on the cohesion theory,this study combines connectives with practical writing,and is committed to finding practical and effective teaching methods to improve the quality of students’ practical writing so that it can provide some help to the teaching of practical writing for grass-roots teachers.We should cultivate students’ awareness and ability of using connectives in the teaching of practical writing in order to improve the quality of students’ practical writing.This study aims to enhance students’ discourse awareness and cohesion abilities as well as their writing strategies in practical writing.