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English writing and discourse teaching _ English writing greetings
With the deepening of SEFC teaching, foreign language teaching in middle schools has begun to pay attention to strengthening the overall teaching of texts in order to cultivate students' reading and writing abilities. This paper is based on the English linguists Halliday and Hassan (Halliday &; Hasan), this paper analyzes the mistakes easily made by middle school students in the process of writing from the perspective of discourse cohesion, in order to promote English writing and discourse teaching in middle school.
First, an analysis of the mistakes students are prone to make in their writing
1. Reference
Any language has some words with reference function, which cannot be understood semantically, but can only be understood by referring to other words. In fact, they act as "signals", indicating that information should be found in context. According to Halliday and Hassan, reference in English can be divided into Personal Reference, Demonstrative Reference and Comparative Reference.
(1) personal care. Words that can be used for personal reference in English include nominative personal pronouns, accusative personal pronouns, possessive qualifiers and possessive pronouns. Different types of personal pronouns play different grammatical roles in sentences. Because students ignore the anaphora of personal pronouns, they often make the mistake of omitting personal pronouns in the writing process. For example,
if you can get over ∧ present differences in English, everything will be all right.
You can't be omitted in this sentence, and it forms a personal reference with you, which plays a certain cohesive role.
(2) indicating care. Words that can be used to indicate anaphora in English include noun deixis (this, that, these, those), definite article the and adverbial deixis (here, there, now, then). Influenced by Chinese, students often make mistakes in indicating reference. For example,
they have no money to buy the car. this is their trouble.
In order to form the anaphora, the "this" should be changed to "that" in the example sentence.
(3) comparative care. Words that can express comparative reference in English include comparative degrees of adjectives and adverbs, and some words that express general comparative meanings, such as same, such as similar, similar, etc., but they are often ignored by students in the writing process. For example,
My handwriting is not bad, but it would otherwise have been made good.
The word "good" in this sentence should be changed to "better", and the word "otherwise" in front of it means a more caring relationship, which is a continuation of the above.
2. substitution
substitution is to replace one word item with another word item or words. The connection between substitute words and substituted words constitutes the cohesion between sentences. To correctly use or understand a sentence with substitute words, we must find the substituted words in the context. Halliday and Hassan divide substitution into nominal substitution (such as one, ones, same, that, those), verbal substitution (such as do, does, did) and clause substitution (such as so, not). Nominal substitution errors often appear in students' compositions. For example:
Your dictionary is better. May I use one?
the word "one" in the example sentence should be changed to "it" to replace the word "your dictionary" in the previous sentence.
3. Ellipsis
Ellipsis is a common phenomenon in language use. Sometimes we don't feel difficult to understand a sentence because it omits some elements, because "language doesn't work in isolation." In practical use, it works as a chapter "(Halliday &; Hasan, 1976), the omitted information in a sentence can usually be found in the context. In English writing, the correct use of ellipsis can avoid unnecessary repetition and make the article concise and prominent. According to Halliday and Hassan, ellipsis can be divided into three categories: nominal ellipsis, verbal ellipsis and clause ellipsis. For example:
I am interested in English and she (is interested) in Chinese.
4. Conjunction
Different from the three cohesive devices discussed above, cohesion does not send a signal to the context to find information, but plays a cohesive role in the text in another way. Connectivity indicates in what sense paragraphs are related to each other, that is, "the semantic connection between the various components of a text". Halliday and Hassan divide discourse cohesion into four categories: progressive (such as and, and also, furthermore, besides), turning (such as but, yet), causality (such as so, as a result) and time (such as then, later). Although some students are quite skilled in judging words that express various linking meanings, they can't use conjunctions freely in the writing process. Most of the paragraphs written are piled up with simple sentences, lacking coherence or misusing conjunctions, which makes the whole chapter incoherent. For example:
I had failed severe times, and I persisted in my plan all the same.
The example shows a turning point, so "and" should be changed to "but" to make the sentence coherent and compact.
5. Lexical cohesion
Reference, substitution, ellipsis and connection all achieve the semantic cohesion of each component of a paragraph (text) through grammatical means, while lexical cohesion achieves the cohesion through the choice of words. A word can make readers anticipate other words that may appear in the same context. Halliday and Hassan divide lexical cohesion into two categories: Reiteration and co-occurrence.
(1) recurrence. Repetition is the repetition of a word in its own form or in the form of synonyms and synonyms, so as to achieve the purpose of discourse coherence. Some students use a word repeatedly in their compositions, which makes the paragraphs monotonous, or they are not clear about the subtle differences between synonyms or synonyms, which leads to semantic errors. For example:
I received a lot of presents from my classes on my birthday last week. One of the presents was an English book. This present reminded me of. My middle school English teacher.
In the paragraph above, students repeatedly use "present" to make the paragraph monotonous. You can change "the presents" in "One of the presents" to "them" and "This present" to "It".
(2) co-occurrence. Co-occurrence means that antonyms or complementary words of some words in a certain text can appear at the same time. There is always cohesion between any group of words (antonyms or complementary words) that are related to each other in some way. Because students ignore this, the sentences written are not vivid enough. For example:
Some of the animals are dead, but most of them are not dead.
Although there are no grammatical and lexical errors in this sentence, students' repeated use of "dead" makes the sentence dull. If "not dead" is changed to "alive" to form "antonym" co-occurrence, the language of the article will be vivid and varied.
Second, teaching suggestions
Through the analysis of the above contents, English writing teaching in senior high schools should properly focus on the overall structure and cohesive devices of the text. To this end, I put forward the following teaching suggestions:
1. Adhere to the training procedure of "sentence → paragraph → article", from easy to difficult, step by step. At the beginning of writing, we should pay close attention to basic skills training. Sentence is the basic unit of the article. When training sentences, we can use conjunctions to form sentences, imitate sentences, rewrite sentences and other forms. After students have mastered the basic sentence patterns and can write basic simple sentences, they will train to write various types of short articles according to the genre of the text.
2. Give full play to the role of Chinese-English translation in senior high school English writing teaching. Chinese-English translation practice is a means to train students to form sentences with conjunctions. Through practice, students can not only understand the similarities and differences between Chinese and English in expression, but also improve their interest in learning English and improve the accuracy of words.
3. Incorporate discourse analysis teaching into text and reading comprehension teaching. English teaching in senior high schools in China still focuses on "sentences" rather than "articles", emphasizing "grammar" rather than "semantics". Discourse analysis teaching is a teaching method from whole to part and from top to bottom, that is, starting with understanding the whole content, analyzing the relationship between sentences and paragraphs, then finding out the central idea and important information in sections, and then putting some long and difficult sentences in the language environment for grammatical analysis and training, so as to enable students to truly master the communicative function expressed by language phenomena and cultivate their ability to construct coherent texts. Therefore, when explaining "Reading Comprehension", teachers should focus on helping students understand the knowledge that plays an important role in text understanding (cohesion means such as reference, substitution, ellipsis, lexical cohesion, connection relation, etc.), and help students analyze the connectives (reasons, time series, concessions, turning points, etc.) and the time, space and causality of the text, so as to clarify the context of the text and absorb the main content of the text.
4. Guide students to write a summary of "reading the text" by means of text cohesion and complete the writing exercises of each unit. The reading text in the new English textbook for senior high school is well-structured and semantically coherent. Teachers can give the key words and topic sentences of the text so that students can use discourse cohesion to connect sentences and articles. In this way, it will greatly promote students' writing skills.
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