A Contrastive Analysis Of Textual Cohesive Devices In English Argumentative Writing Between Chinese And American College Students

This thesis reports a contrastive analysis of the textual cohesive devices employed by the Chinese and American college students in their English argumentative writing with the guidance of Halliday and Hasan's (1976) cohesion theory. Through analyzing the differences in the use of cohesive devices in the writing by Chinese and American college students, it is possible for teachers to understand students' problems in producing a coherent discourse and they can then instruct students to improve the quality of their writing.The subjects of the study are undergraduates in Grade Two majoring in Environmental Sciences from Beijing Forestry University and University of California at Berkley. The 60 (30 from each of the two groups) argumentative essays on the same topic written by them, were selected as samples for analysis in order to avoid the influence of different writing topics, subjects with different grades and majors on study results. In this study, two corpora were built and tagged. Statistical findings are collected for various analytical purposes with the help of software Concordance v3.2. After that, through the t-TEST with the help of SPSS vl4.0, whether there are significant differences in the use of cohesive devices in the two groups of argumentative essays was seen. Moreover, the main problems with cohesive devices used in writing by Chinese students were found. Causes for the problems were then explored in order to find ways to solve these problems.The major findings of the study include:(1) Significant differences between the two groups in the use of reference and lexical cohesion. No statistically significant difference is found between the two groups in the use of substitution, ellipsis and conjunction. (2) The main problems with the cohesive devices used in writing by Chinese students are as follows:overuse of the first person plural; inconsistency and ambiguity in using personal references; improper use of definite article, the; overuse and misuse of conjunctions; overuse of repetition; misuse of lexical items and wrong collocation. It is also found that Chinese college students often use conjunctions at the beginning of the sentences.The study suggests that English teachers should consciously instruct their students to do exercises in error correction with regard to cohesive devices and introduce the differences between English and Chinese in college English classes in China. That would improve the quality of students'writing by decreasing the influence of Chinese negative transfer.