An Analysis Of Cohesion And Informativity Of English Majors’ Argumentative Writing

English writing, as one of the four basic English skills, is an indispensable part in the fieldof second/foreign language teaching, and evaluation of the student’s writing is also consideredto be an important task for English teachers. However, over the past years, the traditional patternof English writing evaluation is time-consuming and lower-effective, and the evaluation criteriaare not uniform, ignoring the overall evaluation of writing. Being aware of the fact thatimproving the quality of students’ writing is a complex process, scholars abroad are veryconcerned about what kind of guiding significance the writing evaluation has for improvingstudents’ writing ability, and they have also done a lot of fruitful empirical researches. But,domestic researchers have not attached much importance to this area. Therefore, how to evaluatethe quality of English learners’ writing more effectively and scientifically has become a pressingtask for English teachers and linguists in China.At present, when assessing the students’ writing, English teachers have all agreed that thediscourse structure is loose, the content is poor, and the whole text lacks coherence and fluency.With the development of text linguistics, in1981de Beaugrande&Dressler put forward sevenstandards of textuality: cohesion, coherence, intentionality, acceptability, informativity,situationality and intertextuality. These criteria undoubtedly serve as an important guidingsignificance for the English writing assessment.Under the guidance of text linguistics, the present study attempts to apply two of the sevenstandards of textuality, cohesion and informativity, to evaluation of students’ writing. The mainobjective is to analyze the characteristics of college English majors’ writing in terms of cohesionand informativity, to demonstrate the key roles played by cohesive ties and model of informationstructure in evaluation of students’ writing, and to prove that they are effective standards ofwriting evaluation. The study randomly selects40compositions as research samples from acorpus of argumentative compositions written by sophomore English majors in a key universityin Shandong Province and then conducts text analysis. The steps are as follows: firstly, useHalliday and Hasan’s (1976) taxonomy of cohesive devices to classify and analyze the cohesiveties used in the sample texts; then, on the basis of the studies on thematic progression home andabroad, analyze the theme types and TP patterns employed in each composition in the hope ofassessing the writing quality from the perspective of informative characteristics at micro-level;finally, adopt tree model of discourse information to analyze the information structure in thesamples and evaluate the informative features from a macro-level. The results are as follows:(1)Judging from the use of cohesive devices, English majors can use a variety of cohesive devices in the argumentative writing, and reference and conjunction have a larger proportion whilelexical cohesion has a small proportion, most of which are simple repetition. In addition,reference, conjunction and lexical cohesion have different levels of use mistakes;(2) Withrespect to the information structure at macro-level, most English majors can give a clearmacro-theme, namely, the core proposition. However, there exist the following problems: lack oflogic between hyper-themes, uneven distribution of information knots, inadequate developmentof information layer, and so on;(3) With regard to the information structure at micro-level,although the problem of incoherence has been found in both groups, problems like loosestructure, illogical in meaning, no semantic relation between clauses are much more common inthe group with low scores, the main reason lies in the low rate of employment of different TPtypes and TP patterns.The present study proves that cohesion and informativity can be used as two effectivecriteria in evaluation of integrity and coherence in students’ compositions. In light of the analysis,it is worthwhile for English teachers to apply textuality in evaluating students’ writing quality. Ifwe can combine cohesion and information structures into traditional writing evaluation, it will beable to guide the teaching of writing more effectively, provide concrete and practical guidancefor the students’ writing revision and, thereby, improve Chinese English learners’ quality ofwriting.