Therefore it is a big challenge for learners to write a coherent and fluent composition.
Compared with other linguistic skills, writing is often considered to be the most difficult one and last one for students to acquire either in first or foreign language. Writing is one of the basic skills that English learners should master, which can objectively reflect the students’ overall language ability and accumulation of different kinds of background knowledge. Based on the results of the questionaire and evaluation, we put forward some practical ideas to help the students and teachers to improve the present situation based on the cohesion and coherence theory. Qestionnaires were used to collect the students’ and teachers’ ideas, and the students’ English compositions were evaluated. The authors investigated the current situation of teaching and learning of writing in English in a middle school at the county level.
Their writing ability in English is the weakest among the four linguistic skills, with almost no awareness of cohesion and coherence. Quite a number of high school teachers have not heard of the basic principles of the theory, let alone applying it in their teaching. Those of high school students have been neglected since teachers and researchers think that they are just beginners, and it is already very good if they can get the grammar and spelling correct in their writing. In China, many researchers and teachers have often studied the university students’ English compositions. Since then, the theory has been widely applied in teaching writing. The book, Cohesion in English, published by Halliday and Hasan in 1976, introduced cohesion and coherence theory in a systematic way. We are very grateful for the help of the teachers and students in the two middle schools at county level in Shanxi Province. This research is based on an earlier similar one done in 2015 by Qiao Jianyu under my guidance in another high school at county level. China.Į-mail: Jianyu is a freelance English teacher now. Ji Lingzhu is an Associate Professor in Foreign Language Department, Taiyuan Normal University Taiyuan, Shanxi, P.R.
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