The Analysis Of Cohesive Devices Used In Chinese College Students’ English Argumentative Writing

Writing, as one of the four basic skills in language learning practice, has beenregarded as being the most difficult skill for language learners, so it’s commonlyconsidered as one of the important criterion to assess one’s language competency. Asfor Chinese students, English writing has been the most challenging task which hasbeen very essential in every level of English proficiency tests. Therefore, the Englishwriting of Chinese students has become an issue attracting much attention fromforeign and Chinese English teachers as well as language researchers. It is obviouslyand basically required to generate grammatical and meaningful sentences, but themore important aspect is to make the sentences and texts more coherent and logicallyconnected. Cohesion, as an important element in text, plays a critical role for theachievement of coherence and textuality. Halliday and Hassan (2000) point out thatcohesion is foundation of text coherence that is the most significant prerequisite for atext. For these reasons, appropriate cohesive devices adopted by students can improvestudents’ writing coherence and writing quality. However, as most error analysis ofstudents’ writing has been made primarily at the sentence level, many Chinesestudents tend to regard the sentence rather than the text as a whole in the process oftheir writing.Based on the cohesion theory and error analysis theory, this thesis investigates asample of40English argumentative writings written by Chinese college students toobserve and explore the general features of cohesive devices used in theargumentative writing and the errors made in the use of each device. Both thequantitative and qualitative methods are employed in this study. The quantitativeanalysis is used to calculate the numbers of all cohesive devices and cohesion errorsfound in the collected compositions; meanwhile, the qualitative method is employedto analyze the reasons for students’ performance in using the cohesive devices in theirargumentative writing.The results of the present study show that among all the cohesive devices, lexicalcohesion is the most frequently used device, followed by reference and conjunctions; however, it is also the weakest point for most students due to the fact that its error rateranks the highest among the three cohesive devices. It is also observed misuses,overuses and underuses of various kinds of cohesive devices are very common instudents writing, which leads to the loss of coherence and logic of the text. Therefore,this paper advices English teachers that they put emphasis on the instruction ofcohesion theory and arouse students’ attention to the appropriate use of variouscohesive devices.