Chapter One Introduction
1.1Background of the Study
With the development of social economy, the process of modern civilization ismore and more quick than ever before. Meanwhile, the whole environment whichman surviving has made big change. Since China entering the WTO, hosting theOlympic Games successfully, developing international cooperation, all kinds ofevents revealed that China has joined the world. The proverb says “young are strong,the country strong.” All my days, China is a country that pays great attentions to itseducation, especially to the study of foreign language teaching. English as a foreignlanguage is spoken by 172 countries and it has become an international language inthe world. Thus, the importance of a good English ability is not only felt by millionsof college students, but also by the students in primary school, middle school and highschool..In China, English curriculum is taking the reform of teaching, what is aimed athelping China integrate to the world more quickly. After a series years of Englishteaching, more and more people realized that learning English well is not in aim topass the exams, but to enhance the skills. With this skill, people can get informationfrom abroad more freely and more quickly. Besides, business man can leave thecountry on business trips; overseas students would get a good knowledge of foreignculture, politics, economy, etc.
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1.2Questions of the Study
For a long time, the conception that a good English level can be reflected by theircompositions is recognized by the professors and millions of scholars, because itneeds a high level of language application ability, as well as other skills. Beyond that,writing a good composition requires collect all kinds of materials and plan carefully,including how to select useful words to express their ideas. Yet good writing skills arevery important to success for a person’s occupation and profession. People who takeswhatever types of jobs need good English writing, this phenomenon can be seen inmany situations, such as in international trade international communication.No matter in the entrance exam for college, or study abroad, writing is often seenas a basic standard which is used to test students’ English level. Teacher can knowone’s English writing ability by means of reading what they have written, and what istheir weakness in writing, that is to say, it provides feedback to the teachers.Among all the problems that they have faced, many educators found that thelack of cohesion and coherence seems to be a serious problem that Chinese students isfacing with, even some teachers think that the Chinese students can make sentencesgrammatically correct, they also have a large number of vocabularies. But when theyare given a topic to express their ideas or attitudes towards something, they often feelit is too difficult to do so. Therefore, many college English teachers only emphasizethe grammatical points in classes, such as whether sentence structures are right or not.Actually, the students’ English writing ability cannot be improved in this way. MostChinese students inherent good memories, so they can remember a lot of words in ashort time and master the grammatical regulations. It is known to all that a goodcomposition not only means a large number of vocabularies with no grammaticalmistakes appear, but also keeps cohesion and coherence in the whole text. Generallyspeaking, the latter is far better than the former. Thus, cohesion and coherence are twoimportant elements for good compositions.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Previous Studies on Cohesion and Coherence Abroad and at Home
Cohesion, which reflects the structure of discourse is an important part of a text.Grammar and vocabulary are reflected by the cohesion of structure. Cohesion is atangible network of discourse ( Huang Guowen, 1988: 10).Cohesion as a conception is first introduced by professor Halliday in 1962. In hispoint of view, various kinds of structure should be connected. What is more, somegrammatical programs have nothing to do with fixed relationship ( Halliday, 1962: 5).American scholar Grimes introduced the definition of relationship of cohesion in hisbook How to keep relationship of cohesion, he points out even if there are somerelationship between what one is saying and what one have said, we still use somemethod to reflect the relationship between them ( Grimes, 1972: 10).Since 1976, the professors of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Hallidayand Hasan wrote a book together, which is called Cohesion in English. In this book,the two authors see cohesion as something decoding the implication of the discourse,and presenting readable or interpretable linguistic materials. They stresses that bothcohesion and coherence are essential to make the linguistic material well understood,thus the writing or utterance of language becomes meaningful.
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2.2 Theoretical Framework
Coherence comes from a Latin word means “to stick together”. Coherence issomething logical or consistent something that makes sense as a whole. As for Englishwriting, coherence is one of the two qualities that gives a written article unity andpurpose. Coherence refers to the general sense that a text makes sense through theorganization of its contents. Coherence means what you write shall be clearlyunderstood by the readers. In English writing, it shall be able to offer a clear andunderstand structure for paragraphs and sentences, namely, coherence. It means theconnection of ideas at the idea level could be developed in order to support one’sargument.When writing an article, coherence shall involve the following features:summing up the overall arguments of the article in the introductory paragraph;showing ideas in a right order; putting separate and major viewpoints into the relevantparagraphs; and beginning each paragraph with a topic sentence, followed by everysentence that says something about the topic of the paragraph. That is to say, thestructure of an article shall be written accurately by producing proper paragraphs withclear topics. Coherence is mainly based on the logic of the ideas and how they arepresented rather than on the words that are used to express ideas. Coherence is verycrucial for a student in that he/ she is able to organize the text into a coherencewhole. A student shall be able to keep his/ her readers well informed about where he/she is and what he/ she is going to write. Coherence plays an important role in makingan article readable for the readers.
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Chapter Three Research Methodology ........25
3.1 The Design of the Experiment ........25
3.1.1The Subject of the Study........25
3.1.2 The Purpose and Hypothesis of the Experiment...........27
3.2 The Process of the Experiment .......28
3.3 Data Collection .......35
Chapter Four Data Analysis and Discussion........36
4.1 Data Analysis ..........36
4.2 Discussion .......424
Chapter Five Conclusion......46
5.1 The Present Results.........46
5.2 The Major Findings.........46
5.3 Limitations of the Study..........47
Chapter Four Data Analysis and Discussion
4.1 Data Analysis
In this study, the writer has conducted a full-scale data analysis involvingquestionnaires, preliminary investigations and post investigations. Through theresearch and analysis, the writer has found the essential differences this experimentmade. The results are shown in black and white that students from EC Class improvedtheir writing abilities and skills have improved based on the devices of cohesion andcoherence. Hence the writer draws up the conclusion that cohesion and coherencedevice is very useful in enhancing students’ writing skills and abilities. In Table 4.1, the mean score for the final test of EC is 16.7431 and the meanscore for the final test of CC is 14.1632. The differences are very remarkable betweenthe two classes. The standard deviation of EC is 3.4366 and the standard deviation ofCC is 2.5665. Also, we can see the P value is 0.013 <0.05, it means the training hasbrought great differences between the two classes. The data analysis show that the students of EC has improved a lot in writing,especially in the cohesion and coherence while the students of CC has also made alittle progress, though it is not as much as those in EC.
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Conclusion
In addition to ensure the students’ ability can be improved, one important pointwe may be noticed is that discourse knowledge and the shortage of basic knowledgeof English is universal among all the college students. While after studying the deviceof cohesion and coherence, students can improve their two basic knowledge asfollows:College students will obtain more knowledge about cohesion, they will not onlyfind the coherence and cohesion important in organizing a text, so the readers cancatch the real meanings given by the authors, otherwise many readers will fellmisunderstood and cannot comprehend the whole text and the ideas that the authorswould like to express in their composition.Many students will be convinced that a good composition will include the followelements: topic review, rich vocabulary, a large number of grammar knowledge, andthe device of coherence and cohesion. Without any elements, the quality of thecompositions will debase.
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References (omitted)