Textual Cohesive Ties Employed By NES And Chinese EFL Writers In Expository Essays:A Contrastive Study

Following the change of focus within language pedagogy over the past decades from sentential level to discourse level, a number of approaches have been taken toward the study of texts. The most influential of the textual analysis techniques, however, in terms of its current appeal in applied linguistics, has been the approach of Michael Halliday and Ruquiya Hasan (1976), known as cohesion theory. The theory with its focus on cohesion as an important text feature contributing to textual coherence has aroused much research work in the field of ESL and EFL teaching. However, few contrastive investigations of textual cohesive ties in NES and EFL students' writing products have been published to date, while this kind of research findings can be quite enlightening for EFL writing instruction. The main purpose of the present study is to explore, first, whether there exists any significant difference between Chinese EFL learners' and NES writers' use of cohesive ties in their expository writing and; second, which of the four types of cohesive devices contribute most to the difference of textual cohesion between the two groups of writing. 94 university-level student writers took part in this study, of which 42 were NES humanities majors at the Nyack College of New York State in the USA and 52 Chinese English majors at Foreign Languages College of Zhejiang Normal University in south-east China. From the total collection of samples, 60 (30 from each of the two groups) essays were selected for analysis. The results indicate that of the four major types of cohesive ties distinguished by Halliday and Hasan (1976), the use of lexical cohesive ties exhibits significant difference between the two groups of expository essays. Qualitative in-depth analyses of the essays from two groups of writing further show that native English writers are more capable of employing cohesive devices effectively to achieve the textual coherence for their essays. By contrast, Chinese EFL writers are more limited in their ability to use cohesive tiesappropriately and effectively, which especially reflected in their misuse of conjunctives and .insufficient use of lexical cohesive ties. Finally, some implications of these findings for EFL writing instruction are discussed and several suggestions for further contrastive writing research are made.