A Study On The Design Of English Writing Teaching Activities Targeting Senior High School Students’ Logical Coherence Problems

The English Curriculum Standards for General Senior High Schools(2017 Edition,revised in 2020)states that teachers should design activities of learning and understanding,applying and practicing,as well as transferring and creating to promote the development of students’ core competencies including language competence,cultural awareness,thinking quality,and learning ability.In English writing,logical coherence is an important factor that affects the quality of writing and can reflect students’ logical thinking ability to a certain extent.However,there are still many logical coherence problems in Chinese senior high school students’ English writing,which are great obstacles to the development of their English logical thinking ability.This study selects students and English teachers from a senior high school in Boxing,Shandong,as the research subjects,collects students’ narrative and argumentative writing texts to build research corpora.Based on the corpora,this study analyzes the logical coherence problems in students’ English writing,explores the causes of these problems,and designs writing teaching activities to improve students’ logical thinking ability.The research questions are as follows.1.What are the logical coherence problems in senior high school students’ English writing?2.What are the causes of logical coherence problems in senior high school students’ English writing? 3.How should teachers design English writing teaching activities targeting senior high school students’ logical coherence problems?This study adopts the methods of corpus research,questionnaire and interview to solve these three questions.Firstly,this study collects students’ English compositions to build research corpora,which is annotated and analyzed based on Cohesion and Coherence Theory and Error Analysis Theory.By comparing and analyzing the research corpora with the reference corpora,the logical coherence problems in senior high school students’ English writing are summarized.Besides,the questionnaire survey is conducted on the research subjects and five high school English teachers are interviewed in order to figure out the causes of these logical coherence problems in students’ English writing.Finally,under the guidance of Constructivism Learning Theory and Bloom’s Taxonomy in Cognitive Domain,and based on the activity-based approach to English learning put forward by the Curriculum Standards,English writing teaching activities are designed for the improvement of students’ logical thinking ability.The study finds that logical coherence problems in senior high school students’ English writing mainly involve the overuse,underuse,and misuse of logical conjunctions.Compared with native speakers,Chinese students overused conjunctions such as also,however,for,and when,while underused conjunctions such as and,although/ though,and so that in narrative writing.In argumentative writing,Chinese students overused conjunctions such as besides,but,so,and first of all,while underused conjunctions such as for example,instead,because of,and while.In addition,senior high school students misused conjunctions such as and,but,so,and finally in their writing.The causes of logical coherence problems consist of three aspects,including the influence of students’ personal factors,teachers’ teaching,and negative transfer of mother tongue.Among them,students’ personal factors include students’ emotions and attitudes towards English writing,students’ thinking patterns and writing habits,as well as students’ knowledge of the basic meaning and usage of conjunctions.Targeting logical coherence problems in senior high school students’ writing,four types of activities are designed in this study,which include “independent learning based on writing corpus”,“situational applied writing”,“genre-based creative writing”,and “writing evaluation and reflection”.Through the series of activities,students’ ability to understand and apply logical conjunctions can be enhanced,and logical reasoning level of students can be improved.This study conforms to the requirements of the activity-based approach to English learning proposed in Curriculum Standards.It can provide a new research perspective for academic research on English writing teaching and expand the practicability of the related theories.Besides,this study provides ideas for the design of English writing teaching activities,and presents a specific teaching case,which provides references for high school English teachers to design English writing teaching activities targeting students’ logical coherence problems.