A Corpus-based Contrastive Study Of Textual Cohesion In Senior High School Students’ English Writing

In senior high school English learning,writing ability,as an important index to measure the comprehensive level of English,is related to the effective output of language.However,in the process of writing,learners generally have weak discourse awareness and inappropriate use of cohesive devices.It can be seen that cohesive devices play an important role in middle school English writing.Based on the discourse cohesion theories of Halliday and Hasan,and based on Halliday’s classification in introduction to functional grammar,this study observed the use of discourse cohesion in English writing of senior high school students from four dimensions,i.e.,anaphora,substitution and ellipsis,conjunction and lexical cohesion.The research objects are senior high school students in Maoming city of Guangdong province from grade 1 to grade 3,by collecting 300 pieces of time-limited of same topic compositions as self-built corpus for cross-sectional study of the use of cohesive devices,meanwhile,the sub-database of Chinese English learners corpus and The Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays for reference,and using of four kinds of software,Range,Treetagger,AntConc and SPSS,for data statistics and analysis.This research aims to explore the two research questions:(1)What is the basic use of anaphora,substitution & ellipsis,conjunction and lexical cohesion in senior high school students’ writing? Which cohesive devices are used more? What are the differences in the use of anaphora,substitution & ellipsis,conjunction and lexical cohesion among senior high school students at different levels?(2)Whether there are differences of high school students at home and native language in the use of the four cohesive devices in the self-built corpus for senior high school students,the sub-database of Chinese English learners corpus and the sub-database of The Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays?The results showed that: 1)There was no significant difference between the use of anaphora in the grade 1 and the grade 2,the use of anaphora in the grade 2 also showed a downward trend,but frequency of use anaphora in the grade 3 of senior high school increased significantly;2)The cohesion of substitution & ellipsis and conjunction in there is no significant difference between the grade 1 and the grade 2,while the frequency of use isincreased in the grade 3,the difference is that the least use in four cohesive devices is substitution & ellipsis,may be affected by its use features,substitution & ellipsis cohesion exist in the conversation,and more students hard to master the using method.However,conjunction cohesion is the most frequently used of the four cohesive devices;3)There was no significant difference between grade 1 and grade 3 of the use of lexical cohesion,but there was significant difference between grade 2 and the other two grades;4)There are significant differences in the use of four cohesive devices among the three corpuses.And self-built high school students’ corpus(SHC)uses four cohesive devices more frequently than the other two corpora,especially the use of conjunction cohesion.In view of this,teachers should consciously strengthen students’ ability of planning and layout,strengthen the training of discourse analysis ability and the use of cohesive devices in the actual teaching of English writing in senior high school,and especially focus on the study and application of lexical cohesion,substitution and ellipsis.