Study Of Cohesion In Argumentative Writing Of Chinese English Majors

This study presents quantitative and qualitative analyses of cohesivedevices in the argumentative writing of Chinese third-year English majorsby applying Halliday and Hasan's model. 96 students from one Chineseuniversity were selected for the study. 30 of their papers randomly chosenare analyzed and assessed by two raters. The study was designed to explore:Question 1: Whether High group and Low group show a significantdifference in their use of cohesive devices.Question 2: What are the relationships between the number of thecohesive devices and quality score of the argumentative compositions?Question 3: Which cohesive devices have significant main effects onthe quality of argumentative writing?The statistical analyses were conducted by using SPSS11.5.Independent Samples T-test, Pearson's correlation and UNIANOVA wereemployed to investigate three questions respectively. The results obtainedare as follows:The results of Independent Samples T-test show that there aresignificant difference between the two groups in the use of all the threecohesive devices. However, students of Low group use more reference thanthose of High group for t<0.When conducting further study on their sub-categories, we find thatthere are no significant difference between two groups in the use ofcomparative reference, additive conjunction, same word, superordinate andgeneral word, and significant difference in adversative, causal and temporalconjunction, synonym or near synonym and collocation. Althoughsignificant difference exists in personal and demonstrative reference, moreuse of cohesive devices in low group.The results of Pearson's correlation analyses show that positivesignificant correlations exist between all cohesive devices and quality score,but not including reference which has little relationship to quality score.As for their sub-categories, we find that there are positive correlationwith quality score in comparative reference, adversative, causal andtemporal conjunction, synonym or near synonym and collocation, negativecorrelation in personal reference and non-significant correlation indemonstrative reference, same item, superordinate and general noun.The results of UNIANOVA show that lexical cohesion has a significantmain effect on writing score, but reference and conjunction do not.Further investigation on their sub-categories shows that personal andcomparative reference, temporal conjunction, synonym or near synonymand collocation have significant effects on quality score, but others do not.As for cohesive features, we find some common weaknesses in thestudents'writing in terms of the use of reference, conjunction and lexicalcohesion, which include ambiguity in reference, overuse and not effectiveuse of conjunctions, lack of word variation in poor students'writing, misuseof lexical item in collocations, etc.The research attempts to promote the understanding of cohesion in textand provides insights into the role of it in EFL writing in order to upgradeargumentative writing instruction and improve the quality of composition.