《Coherence and the Teaching of EFL Writing》由会员分享，可在线阅读，更多相关《Coherence and the Teaching of EFL Writing（5页珍藏版）》请在金锄头文库上搜索。
1、 Coherence and the Teaching of EFL Writing (中山大学外国语学院2001级研究生 姜智慧) Writing is one of the four basic abilities (listening, speaking, reading and writing) that an English learner as a foreign language learner should have. But writing well is not an easy task. An excellent writer should have not only a
2、 good command of grammar, but also should know how to make his composition coherent in structure and content. My experience in teaching writing to undergraduates at Central South University shows that incoherence is a recurring problem in the students writing and can be a major obstacle to their suc
3、cess in writing classes. “I can not follow your argument” and “I do not understand what you are saying” are just two of the comments written on students papers to indicate the inability of the papers to be understood by their teachers. Unfortunately, unlike grammatical errors which can be easily cor
4、rected, errors in coherence are more difficult to handle as they involve a chunk of units, such as a series of sentences and paragraphs. Most ESL teachers may believe that they have a sense of what coherence is, but they often discuss coherence with their students in vague terms. As a result, studen
5、ts do not have a clear understanding of the concept of coherence, often focusing only on errors at sentence level when asked to revise their own work or that of their colleagues. Coherence is an area that deserves teachers attention. This paper aims at making students understand what coherence is an
6、d aware of their errors in writing which they did not pay any attention to before. And I hope this paper will be also beneficial to teaching of EFL writing.First, it is necessary to give a clear definition of coherence.What is coherence?Coherence can be generally viewed in two aspects: test-based an
7、d reader-based coherence (Johns, 1986).Text-based coherence refers to the features associated with the internal structure of the text itself. It is a textual phenomenon, linguistic devices, which is closely connected with the form of the text.Reader-based coherence is associated with the meaningful
8、aspect of writer-reader interaction.Coherence and textA text is distinguished from a non-text by its texture. The texture is primarily provided by cohesion, which is a semantic concept, which refers to relations of meaning that exist in the text, and that define it as a text cohesion occurs where th
9、e interpretation of some element in the discourse is dependent on that of another. The one presupposes the other, in the sense that it can not be effectively decoded except by recourse to it. Since the speaker or writer uses cohesion to signal texture, the listener or reader has to react to it in or
10、der to interpret it “(Halliday and Hassan, 1976)Coherence holds segments of a text together, making it a semantic edifice, just as motor does bricks or stones in a building. The importance of coherence lies in the continuity it expresses between one part of the text and another.Text-based coherenceC
11、oherence of a text reflects both in its unity of ideas and its structure.Unity of ideas:A text usually has a controlling idea which is usually presented in the first paragraph by the writer. Then each paragraph in the following may has a main idea (topic sentence) which must be related to the contro
12、lling idea (thesis statement) of he text. So the context of each paragraph must serve for the main idea. The unity of ideas makes a text coherent. In order to obtain this successfully, methods are always helpful or even necessary: in this regard, the following paragraph is incoherent. CITIZENSHIP: D
13、O ILLEGAL IMMERANTS DESERVE IT?Ever since its first existence, man has known power as the highest target. No one doubts that economy is the strongest weapon of total control .Singapore with the smaller than Pahang for example, is actually the giant in South East Asia. It has an economic growth rate
14、of 11 percent and foreign savings of 230 billion dollars. Man dares to do anything including begging and killing in order to fulfill his desire and sense of self love. Due to this very statement, I strongly believe that no illegal immigrant should be given citizenship in view of the countrys develop
15、ment.This introductory paragraph has not advanced any coherent background information in relation to the thesis statement that “no illegal immigrant should be given citizenship.” Although some of the points may be useful in providing background context, the connections between those points are not s
16、hown. The student should state clearly the reasons that make him or her feel that illegal immigrants do not deserve to be given citizenship. Is it due to social problems that have caused in the country such as begging or killing? Is it because it is a hindrance to the countrys development? These and other questions have to be asked by the student to clarify his or her ideas in the introduction.Unity of StructureA
