A Study On The Application Of Lexical Cohesion Model In English Writing By High School Students

In EFL learning, writing is one of the most important and basic skills and is alsomost difficult language skill for many learners. Some studies at home and abroadsuggest that there is a close relationship between lexical cohesion and writing quality.However, these studies mainly focus on college students, and most of them deal withcompositions of CET-4and CET-6. There are not sufficient experimentation andresearch to prove such relationship existing in senior high school students’ writing.Besides, with the improvement of students’ writing ability in the recent years, newwriting characteristics has been presented in the compositions of senior high schoolstudents. In this background, the current study is conducted to investigate theapplication of lexical cohesive devices in senior high school students’ compositions.To be specific, the distribution of lexical cohesive devices in sample compositions ofhigher-scored group and lower-scored group is examined, and the relationshipsbetween each lexical cohesive devices and the quality of senior high school students’writings are discussed. Moreover, the similarities and differences in students’ use ofeach lexical cohesive device are also be analyzed.On the basis of lexical cohesion theory proposed by Halliday&Hasan and Hoey, aquestionnaire and writing test were carried out in the present study. The subjects were120students of two high schools in Xi’an Shaanxi. In this study, SPSS19.0wasemployed to analyze the collected data from the questionnaire and writing test.Independent Sample T-tests and Pearson Correlation were conducted in the analysissample compositions.The statistic results of the study show that there exists a strongly significance relationship between the number of lexical cohesive device and the quality of seniorhigh school students’ compositions. Higher-scored group students employed morenumber of lexical cohesive devices than lower-scored group students. Among thesesubtypes of lexical cohesive ties, simple repetition, complex repetition and collocationis highly correlated to the quality of students’ writing. In addition, the results displayeda negative correlation between the adoption of simple repetition and students’ score,which indicates that excessive use of simple repetition has to do nothing withcoherence of a text and might be counterproductive to improvement of writing quality.On the basis of the above analysis results, the researcher provided suggestions forEnglish writing teaching at senior middle school.