摘要
目前，尽管大多数写作教程把衔接纽带—替代、省略、连接词等列为学生写作中应掌握的技能，然而，写作课教师仍然会发现学生的作文就单个句子而言语法正确，但总的语义不连贯。
韩礼德的系统功能语言学一直被应用于写作教学，尤其是他的语篇功能理论。该理论主要包括衔接系统和主位系统。然而，回顾近年来致力于英语写作教学的研究，我们发现大部分研究只涉及衔接系统，而忽视了对主位的选择和信息的排列方面的研究及应用。
本文试图把衔接理论、主位结构及信息结构应用于写作教学，以探索培养学生写作能力的有效途径。本研究分两个阶段，第一阶段的目的是通过比较中国大学生(非英语专业)优劣作文中的衔接错误来分析衔接错误模式在多大程度上影响写作质量。结果显示，韩礼德的五大类衔接纽带中没有哪一类对作文的优劣产生足够的影响。通过进一步的分析，我们发现词汇衔接中的简单重复是导致作文优劣的主要因素。其次，连贯错误分析表明，影响作文优劣的主要因素是学生缺乏主题意识、缺乏对语篇结构及语篇中信息排列的认识。
第二阶段的目的是：尝试与主位结构和信息结构理论相关的四种可行性方法，并展示这些方法如何对学生作文产生巨大的连贯性。这些方法包括：(1)在语境中掌握词汇以避免简单重复；(2)段落中写出典型的主题句；(3)掌握主位发展的方法；(4)掌握信息结构和突出信息重心的方法。研究证实这些方法有助于写作课教师在语篇层面上指导学生写作，从而培养学生写作能力。
Nowadays, most writing courses incorporate work designed to help learners grasp the cohesive devices of written English: reference, substitution ellipsis, conjunctions, and so forth. However, L2 writing instructors still come across ESL student compositions in which sentences, assessed in isolation, are grammatically correct and yet the overall effect is incoherent.
Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics has long been applied to writing, especially the textual functions, which largely include cohesion system as well as Theme-Rheme system. However, reviewing recent literature work, which contributed to the teaching of L2 writing, we can see that the research is usually closely linked to the cohesive ties (Halliday, 1976). Research work on choice of theme and information arrangement is neglected in achieving coherent writing.
The present study is an effort to apply cohesion theory, thematic structure and information structure to practical issues in second language writing to explore the effective ways of furthering students' writing ability. It is divided into two stages. The objective of the first stage is to test to what extent cohesive-error patterning affects the quality of writing by making a comparison of cohesive error patterns between good and poor compositions of Chinese college seniors (non-English majors). As a result, Halliday's five categories of cohesive ties fail to confirm that any of them is sufficient to distinguish good from poor writing. By further analysis, we find simple repetition in lexical ties is the main factor that leads to variation in writing quality between two groups. Furthermore, the coherence error analysis show us that the main factors which affect the quality of writing is lack of awareness of topic sentence, text organization and information arrangement in a text.
The objective of the second stage is to try four types of possible exercises related to thematic structure and information structure, and show how they can be exploited to provide for greater coherence in our students' compositions. These approaches concern
(l)Avoiding repetition by learning words in context; (2) Writing a typical topic-sentence paragraph; (3) Understanding the concept of Theme development; and (4) Understanding information structure and highlighting information focus. We find that they are proved to be very helpful as a tool of instruction at the level of discourse for the writing teacher.
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