An Investigation Of The Cohesive Problems In The Argumentative Writing Of The Chinese English Majors

As one of the basic skills in English teaching, writing is an indispensable part in the teaching of a foreign language, the development of which has always been emphasized. However, the present English writing teaching in China seems to focus too much on correcting grammatical errors acquiring on the sentence level, such as syntactic correction and lexical accuracy, and pay little or even no attention to the ways in which sentences and paragraphs are combined to form a coherent text. Therefore, how to correctly use the cohesion theory to get a coherent writing has become the key problem in English writing, aiming at which the cohesive problems have aroused general concern in writing performance.The major studies abroad concerned with the relationship between the frequency of cohesive devices and quality of writing; while Chinese scholars'attention mainly focused the feature of textual cohesion in Chinese EFL learners'writing or the relationship between the use of cohesive devices and the quality of writing. Using Halliday and Hasan's (1976) taxonomy of cohesive devices and Hyland's (1990) generic structure of argumentative writing, this study attempted to identify the cohesive problems on micro and macro levels in the argumentative writing created by the Chinese English majors. It was designed to investigate (1) the ways students tend to use cohesive devices (2) whether frequencies of cohesive devices are involved in cohesive problems that lead to the poor quality of argumentative writing (3) the typical problems students have with the overall organization of argumentative writing, which prevent their writings from being cohesive.80 second-year English majors in Yili Normal University participated in the study, each of whom was asked to write an argumentative composition and answer questionnaires. 30 compositions were analyzed in terms of two aspects: the cohesive devices and the overall organization in the argumentative writing performance. Meanwhile, 80 questionnaires were collected with the aim to dig out the main reasons and try to find out the effective solutions. Major findings include: 1. the students were able to use a variety of cohesive devices in their writing, among which reference devices formed the largest percentage of the total number of cohesive devices; 2. the main cohesive problem in argumentative writing was involved in the inappropriate use of cohesive devices rather than use frequencies; 3. the unacceptable topic sentences among each body paragraphs prevent the coherent writing from being cohesive.The results show that although Chinese English majors have competence in manipulating vocabulary and grammar, they have many problems in using cohesive devices and constructing coherent text, which is not only due to one reason but the combination of several factors, such as deficiency of relevant knowledge, native language transfer, etc, but students' weak sense of texture in writing can be regarded as the root cause. In fact, English teachers seldom or even not impart the necessary knowledge about text, cohesion and coherence in English writing teaching. All of causes lead to the difficult situation for Chinese learners to construct a coherent and logical text. On the basis of the major findings, suggestions are put forward on how to carry out the integrated approach in the ways of equipping teachers with cohesion theory as a theoretical guidance; introducing cohesion theory to the students; trying to overcome unnecessary transfer from the native language, using effective activities in teaching, and focusing on the reader-based approach, etc. However, the research is still limited with some unsolved problems, and the application and function of cohesion theory in English writing teaching is still open to further study and discussion. Hopefully, the present thesis may shed light on any further research.