Discourse Connectives and Paragraph Comprehension
Yung-Aun Li · 復興崗學報 · 1997
This paper deals mainly with the comprehension of a paragraph in terms of the conjunction relationships in the paragraph. Conjunction relationships can be demonstrated either with discourse connectives or withour. (Halliday and Hasan, 1976:226-227) Either way, there will be proper conjunction relationships in order to maintain the cohesion of sentences in a paragraph. This paper will first introduce the concept of coordination and subordination, which, as the bases, will be applied to the analysis of the relationships of sentences in a paragraph. Various conjunction relationships will then be presented to explain the structure of a paragraph and, as an example, a paragraph will be analyzed in terms of those conjunction relationships. Another way of paragraph comprehension through the rhetorical relationships of Chi Cheng, Juan, and Ho will also be presented. In the end of this paper, some pedagogical suggestions will be put forward of how to apply those various relationships of paragraph comprehension to the teaching of English reading and writing to Chinese students.