An Analysis Of Cohesive Errors In Senior High School Students’ Continuation Task And Teaching Strategies For Improvement

Writing is an important skill in the use of English.Textual cohesion is essential to the coherence and integrity of the text.General Senior High School English Curriculum Standards(2017 edition revised in 2020)puts forward more requirements on cohesion for students’ writing ability.Whether the cohesive devices are correctly used affects the composition quality.Continuation task,a task combining reading with writing to improve L2 learning has been used as a proficiency test component in NMET(the Chinese National Matriculation English Test).The task needs higher requirements for students to master the cohesive devices.Therefore,it is necessary for teachers to understand and solve the students’ cohesive errors in continuation task to improve their English writing ability and quality.From the perspective of Halliday and Hasan’s textual cohesion theory and Corder’s error analysis theory,this paper investigates how the students use cohesive devices in continuation task.Data of samples in an English test are collected from 100 compositions of Class A and Class B of Grade two in Wuhan L Senior High School.The questionnaire and interview with teachers are supplemented.The purposes are:(1)to explore the distribution of the use of cohesive devices in senior high school students’ continuation task;(2)to find out the distribution of cohesive errors and the types of errors in senior high school students’ continuation task;(3)to analyze the causes of cohesive errors in senior high school students’ continuation task,put forward feasible teaching strategies and test them.The study results are as follows:(1)Reference is the most frequently used cohesive devices in senior high school students’ continuation task,then lexical cohesion,conjunction and ellipsis.Substitution is the least frequent.(2)Reference errors are the most common errors in students’ composition,followed by lexical cohesion,conjunction,ellipsis and substitution.(3)The error types of reference are the misuse of reference,lack of reference,ambiguous reference and superfluous reference.The error types of conjunction are the misuse of conjunction,duplicate conjunction and lack of conjunction.The error types of ellipsis are the misuse of ellipsis and lack of ellipsis.The error types of substitution are the misuse of substitution and lack of substitution.The error types of lexical cohesion mainly focus on the misuse and overuse of lexical cohesive devices.(4)The errors are mainly caused by students’ lack of textual cohesion knowledge,the negative impact of Chinese language habits on English writing,the lack of specialized training of textual cohesion and teachers’ lack of systematic explanation of textual cohesion knowledge.Based on the above research results,this study puts forward the corresponding teaching strategies for improvement,including strengthening the systematic explanation of textual cohesion knowledge,the specialized training of cohesive devices,the comparative analysis of cohesive devices in English and Chinese,training students’ ability to fully utilize the cohesive devices in the preceding text and the function of reading to promote writing,which have been tested.The author hopes to provide some pedagogical implications for senior high school English teachers’ writing teaching and senior high school students’ English writing.