Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Research Background
Writing, or in a more specific term，composing, is one of the basic parts in language useand "widely recognized as a vital skill for educational and professional purposes (Shen, 2010:1)". Williams (2007: 12) considered writing as a complex process involving a variety of skillsand types of knowledge. Canale and Swain (cf_ Schmitt, 2008: 253) regarded it as a strategicmanifestation of social and grammatical competences，while Wang (2006: 74) took it as acognitive-psychological information manipulation with complex human brain activities.Therefore, it is reasonable to argue that writing has a complicated nature embedded with notonly linguistic-rhetorical factors but also socio-cultural and cognitive-psychological ones.The progressing of the subject Discourse Analysis (DA) in applied linguistics providestremendous new insights in the fields of ESL/EFL writing education and thus affords greathelps for scholars and educators to delve deeper into the process，product and pedagogy of L2writing. Two well-known contributors worthy of note in such revolution aresystemic-functional linguistics and its cognitive-psychological counterpart, which groundedsocio-cultural context on the one place，and cognitive-psychological issue on the other. Therecent publications in the Journal of Second Language Writing indicates thatsystemic-functional studies on ESL/EFL writing are genre-based with a highly productivesituation in many ways, covering a wild range of research areas such as lexical cohesion, L2literacy instruction and teacher education, vocabulary and grammar teaching as well aspedagogical approach development，and so forth. Cognitive-psychological studies onESL/EFL writing, however，are still far from richness and systematicness.
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1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Study
The present thesis might be one of the in-depth studies that investigating coherence ofthe writing in Chinese college EFL students by means of the cognitive reference point (CRP)model based on the framework of cognitive grammar. It attempts to conduct an empirical study on the research questions that whether the use of CRP model could increase collegestudents' interests in English writing, and whether the use of CRP model could improve thecoherence of their English writing. It is hoped that the study could provide some usefulsuggestions and implications for the Chinese EFL writing education.
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Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.1 Review of Literature on Coherence
This section of the chapter will start with those definitions on coherence throughout thehistory, stepping with an overview of the notions by different linguistic schools and theirtheoretical studies on coherence. The study on the term coherence is nothing new in history. Rhetoricians in Greececenturies ago could be considered as the pathfinders of the study, who initially treatedcoherence as a relation of sentence represented by some of the specific words. For example,rhetorical scholar Bain (cf. Lee, 2002:136), in the 19 century, defined coherence as somekind of between-sentences connections which linked a large text together by transitionaldevices. One of the problems in this definition, as Lee (ibid) claims is that this conceptionconstrued coherence too narrowly because of the impact of the sentence-level grammar inwriting textbooks at that time. Actually, the literal meaning of coherence is quite simple.According to Dictionary of Language and Linguistics (2006: 198)，the term "coherence" isderived from a Latin verb “cohaerere”, meaning to stick together. However, to define it interms of the usage in real situations is quite a different story. One that makes difficulties todefine coherence is the subjectivity of its nature. It was deemed to be defined as “an abstract and fuzzy concept (Lee，2002:135)" which “is not something that exists in words orstructures but something that exists in people (Yule, 2006:126)", and in that case, thedefinition might vary from people to people because they usually tried to arrive at aninterpretation that made sense with their own experiences in the world. Therefore，Grade andKaplan (1996:67) have perorated that the consensus on the matter of an overall definition ofcoherence had never been achieved.
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2.2 Coherence and ESL/EFL Writing
In this section of the chapter, a general overview on the present situations of ESL/EFL writing will first be taken into consideration, followed with those empirical studies oncoherence in ESL/EFL writing both abroad and at home. Since the middle age of the 20 century, teaching writing as one of the subjects inapplied linguistic has experienced a lot of changes, thus arousing a great interest in the public.Although the current emphasis in English L2 Avriting research strongly follows its LIcounterparts on the basis of the argument that research methods useful in LI contexts shouldalso be applicable to L2 (Grabe and Kaplan, 1996: 29-30)，there is still one thing in presentESL and EFL writing education that differentiating the later from the former. It is the shiftingof L2 writing nature from "writing as learning to write" to “writing as learning to mean”，andthe result of which is the moving from the researches on L2 writer's correctness of thegrammar usage and spelling in writing to the researches on cognitive-psychological andsocio-culture issues that exert impacts on L2 writing.
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Chapter 3 Theoretical Framework ........18
3.1 Models of Cognitive Reference Point (CRP)....... 18
3.1.1 Langacker's CRP Model .......19
3.1.2 Wang's CRP Model .......20
3.2 Coherence and Cognitive Reference Point (CRP) Models....... 25
3.3 Summary .......27
Chapter 4 Research Methodology....... 29
4.1 Research Questions .......29
4.2 Subjects.......29
4.3 Instruments....... 30
4.4 Procedures .......32
4.4.1 Research Procedures of the Experimental Group....... 32
4.4.2 Research Procedures of the Control Group....... 40
4.5 Data Collection....... 40
Chapter 5 Results and Discussion....... 42
5.1 Data Analysis .......42
5.2 Results....... 42
5.3 Discussions....... 55
Chapter 5 Results and Discussion
5.1 Data Analysis
In this section of the chapter, all the quantitative data obtained from test papers，questionnaires and interviews will be analyzed by means of the SPSS 19.0，the latest updatedversion of Statistic Package for Social Science. First，the Independent-Sample T Test will beemployed so as to find out whether the English writing level of subjects in EG and CG hassignificant differences before and after the experiment. Second, the Paired-Sample T Test willbe adopted in order to make sure whether the interest and attitude of subjects in EG havechanged before and after the experiment. Besides，the CRP models used in students' testpapers before and after the experiment will be treated as the qualitative data to make analysisand comparison.
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Conclusion
In this chapter, a conclusion on major findings of the study will be depicted，followed bythe presentation of the pedagogical implications as well as the limitations of the research thatneed to be further investigated. By means of the CRP models grounded on the framework of cognitive grammar, thispaper conducted an empirical study on the research questions that whether the use of suchmodels could increase college students' interests in English writing and improve thecoherence of their English writing. With the help of the instruments, the quantitative analysistogether with the qualitative analysis has been carried out on the previous chapter，and twomajor findings are listed as follows:For answering the first research question，the pre-study and post-study questionnaireshave been conducted before and after the experiment. The quantitative data on questionnairepapers demonstrate that subjects' interests do increase after the employment of the CRPmodels in writing class, but such increasing do not significant.
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Reference (omitted)