A Research On The Errors Of Textual Cohesive Devices In Senior High School Students’ English Writing

English Curriculum Standards for General High School(2020)points out that students need to use not only vocabulary and grammar knowledge in writing,but also organize language into a cohesive and coherent text.It has emphasized the great importance of cohesion and coherent in writing.However,students usually over-emphasize the usage of grammars and words.They have not realized that cohesion plays the vital role in English writing,which leads to lower quality of writing.Whereas some students’ writings cannot be coherent,whose writings are full of run-on sentences,or confusing in meaning.Additionally,when analyzing students’ compositions,the author finds that there are some problems in grammatical cohesive devices in students’ English writing.Given the above situation,this thesis tries to investigate the problems of students in the use of grammatical cohesive devices in their compositions,and provides some relevant suggestions in order to improve the quality of students’ writings.Both quantitative questionnaire and qualitative interview are served as instruments in this thesis.Therefore,the author applies textual cohesion theory that is proposed by Halliday & Hasan in the book called Cohesion in English in 1976 in English writing.This thesis is designed to address the following two questions:1.What errors of grammatical cohesion occur in English writing by senior high school students?2.Why senior high school students make errors of cohesive devices in English writing?The major findings and results are stated as follows: firstly,after analyzing sample writings,the author finds that there are some errors in the use of reference,substitution,ellipsis and conjunction,but the common errors are reference and conjunction.There are four types of errors in the usage of reference.They are the use of chaotic personal reference,personal reference missing,personal reference redundance and demonstrative reference redundance.Besides,there are three kinds of errors in the use of conjunction.They are errors of conjunctive collocation,the conjunction missing and the misuse of conjunction.Secondly,the reasons or influencing factors can be explored by handing out questionnaires and conducting interviews.The main reasons are these four aspects.They are insufficient input of cohesive devices,negative transfer of Chinese,negative affective factors toward cohesive devices,and insufficient systematic teaching guidance on cohesive devices.Based on the major findings in the thesis,the author provides some suggestions for English writing teaching to enhance students’ ability in using cohesive devices properly in English compositions.There are three suggestions.They are increasing input,strengthening the comparative analysis of English and Chinese in using cohesive devices,and enhancing systematic teaching guidance on cohesive devices.Students’ ability to use cohesive devices properly can be enhanced through these suggestions.Finally,it can holistically improve the quality of students’ English writing.