A Study On The Use Of Textual Cohesion Of Senior High School Students’ English Continuation Task

Up to now,quite a lot studies have been made on the application of cohesion in English writing,but most of them focus on the writing of college students and few on that of senior high school students.Meanwhile,the discussion on the unstructured cohesion of the combination of grammar and vocabulary is still in the development stage among the related studies.Continuation task,the new question type,used after the reform of the college entrance examination,occupies a large proportion of the college entrance examination score,and is the key and difficult point in recent years.Therefore,exploring the present situation of the use of cohesion in continuation can provide reference for follow-up work.In view of this,this study adopts the methods of text analysis and questionnaire survey,selects 159 students from three classes in the second year of senior high school in Zhangzhou as the research subject,collects 157 continuation samples of their final exam in total,and makes a unstructured cohesion analysis based on Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion theory,in order to investigate the following three questions: 1)What is the general situation of the use of discourse cohesion in English continuation task for senior high school students? 2)What are the main mistakes of cohesive devices in English continuation task for senior high school students? 3)What is the correlation between the application of cohesive devices and the scores of continuation writing?This study reveals that: 1)Ordinary senior high school students use cohesive devices in continuation writing unevenly,in which the number of grammatical cohesion is higher than that of lexical cohesion,and the most frequently used in grammatical cohesion is personal reference,followed by conjunction.Reiteration is the most frequently used in lexical cohesion,while substitution and omission are the least.2)There are some mistakes in each type of cohesion in high school students’ continuation writing,and the mistake rate in descending order is reference,connection,reiteration,collocation,ellipsis and substitution.The main mistakes in reference are misuse,absence,redundancy and unclear reference;the main mistakes in connection are improper use,redundancy and absence;in ellipsis and substitution,the errors are mainly classified into absence;in lexical cohesion,the mistakes are overuse of reiteration and disorder of collocation.3)After the correlation analysis,it is found that there is a significant positive correlation between the score and the three kinds of referential cohesion,the four kinds of connections,the same words and synonyms of reiteration and complementarity of collocation,while there is no correlation between the score and superordinate,hyponym,general words in reiteration and antonymy of collocation.Based on the survey results,this study concludes that ordinary senior high school students lack flexibility and mastery of cohesion devices in continuation task.Nevertheless,cohesion has a positive impact on the quality of continuation writing to a certain extent.Therefore,in order to help students make better use of cohesive devices in future writing,the study puts forward corresponding suggestions for teachers’ reference.