Error Analysis Of The Use Of Cohesive Devices In The EFL Students' English Writing

Writing, as the most difficult skill among the four English skills-listening, speaking. reading and writing, has attracted the attention of many foreign and Chinese teachers of English, for Chinese learners of English, the obvious difficulty is to produce grammatical and meaningful sentences, and it is even more difficult to make all the sentences logically connected, i.e. coherent. Halliday and Hasan (1976:13) point out that cohesion is the foundation of coherence that is the most important prerequisite for the text. Therefore, investigation of cohesive devices used by students can help them improve the quality of their writings. Most EA (Error Analysis) has been done primarily at sentence level. Such a situation has led the sentence, rather than the text as a whole to receive primary focus of study (Johns, 1984).This thesis will apply error analysis to discourse level. The present study is a data-based EA of Chinese non-English major college students in their L2 (English) compositions. We apply the theories of error analysis and cohesion theory, to make quantitative analysis of the cohesive devices, calculating the number of them and cohesion errors, meanwhile to make qualitative analysis, analyzing the reasons underlying their performance, and thus to strengthen the awareness of both teachers and learners in using the cohesive devices. It is expected that error analysis of cohesive devices would have some significant pedagogical implications for the teaching of English writing in China.The present study reveals that the lexical cohesion is the weakest item for the students because of the highest error proportion among the three cohesion types. That implies the emphasis of the teacher's instruction. This thesis shows that overuse, misuse and omission of cohesive devices in writing have become a problem that plagues many English learners who use cohesive devices incorrectly without instruction. In order to raise the students' discourse awareness, this paper argues that teachers should call their attention to the proper use of cohesive devices.