Teaching Freshmen Lexical Cohesion in Academic English Writing

Lexical cohesion has been neglected in English language teaching in mainland China for a long time and students tend to overuse conjunctive elements in their academic writing. This essay aims at teaching freshmen in mainland China to understand how to achieve lexical cohesion through the analysis of a text from The Economist and thus lay a solid foundation for their future academic English writing. Firstly, I will introduce the teaching context of lexical cohesion in mainland China in terms of its difficulty and importance and explain the reasons why I choose this text for analysis. In the next section, I will analyze it using two analytical tools: Nunan’s lexical cohesive category and Flowerdew’s signaling nouns. Then, I will provide pedagogical suggestions and design one activity to teach freshmen in mainland China lexical cohesion in academic English writing. At last, I will anticipate the challenge teachers may encounter when applying this activity and think about the countermeasures.