Cohesive Device Application Training--Its Effect On Chinese EFL Learners' Writing Performance

The last three decades or so has seen a considerable growth of interest in text linguistics. As a unit of language beyond sentence level, text has been studied in applied linguistics. With the emergence and full bloom of functional grammar, more and more researchers use Halliday's textual function theory to analyze a text. As one of the components of functional grammar, cohesion theory has been introduced and studied widely in China. This theory has been applied in the study of foreign language teaching. Research in EFL writing reveals that lack of awareness of cohesion and coherence can be seen in most EFL students' compositions. Suggestions on the necessity of applying cohesion theory in English writing teaching are raised. However, few people ever did any investigation on the efficiency of this teaching method, which is what the present study focuses on.In this thesis, the author first introduces the background, purpose and significance of the present study, pointing out the weakness of previous relevant studies. Previous relevant studies just make static analysis on the cohesive features of students' writing. In the present study, the author conducts a training on application of cohesive devices on Chinese EFL undergraduates to detect the effect of this training on their writing performance. After a full discussion on the theoretical basis of the present study, we made the following hypotheses. (1) The coherence of EFL students writing will be improved through the training, which can be seen from the fact that cohesive devices are more frequently used and fewer errors are made in the use of cohesive devices in their writing after the training on the application of cohesive devices. (2) Among all the subcategories of cohesive devices, conjunction and lexical cohesion are probably more sensitive to the training. Qualitative and quantitative methods are used to analyze the use of cohesive devices in English compositions written by Chinese EFL undergraduates. One hundred and twelve compositions were collected from the junior English majors in UESTC. Forty of them were randomly selected and divided into two samples (sample 1 are compositions written before the training on application of cohesive devices and sample 2 are the compositions written after the training) for statistical analysis. For sake of comparability, subjects were asked to write two compositions on topics "Impact of Internet on People's Life" (pre-training) and "Can Computer Replace Us" (post-training) in 150 words.We adopted Halliday and Hasans' (1976) taxonomy of cohesive devices as framework of the present study. Their taxonomy classifies cohesive devices into five subcategories — reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. Based on this framework, cohesive devices used in the sampled compositions were identified. Descriptive statistics and inferential statistics were used in data analysis. Results of the study confirmed the hypotheses. Certain cohesive errors were identified in the students' writing including ambiguity in reference, overuse and misuse of conjunctions, and restricted use of lexical cohesion. Based on our results, the conclusion is drawn that the training on the application of cohesive devices is effective to improve EFL students' writing performance and is most effective to improve the use of conjunction and lexical cohesion and less effective to reference, while the training is not effective to improve the use of substitution & ellipsis.