A Discursive Study Of Chinese College Students' Argumentative Writing In English From The Perspective Of Cohesion And Coherence

The present research aims to identify the common features of the argumentative essays written by Chinese college students in terms of the organizational pattern and the use of cohesive devices, which are respectively on the macro-level and micro-level of discourse and considered to play an important role in the achievement of textual coherence.In this study thirty compositions randomly chosen from ninety argumentative essays written on one topic by fourth-year English majors in one Chinese university are analyzed. The generic structure of the argumentative essay proposed by Hyland (1990) is applied as a criterion in the analysis of the organizational pattern of these essays, and Halliday and Hasan's (1976) taxonomy of cohesive devices is employed in the investigation of the cohesive features of the compositions. The results of our analysis show that in terms of the organizational pattern the students in general all have some knowledge of the structure of the English argumentative essay, and problems exist mainly at the Argument stage of the argumentative writing, which include the absence of the Claim-Support pair and of Marker, etc. As for the cohesive features, the students' essays also display some common weaknesses regarding the use of reference, conjunction and lexical cohesion, which include ambiguity in reference, overuse and misuse of conjunctions, overuse of repetition, misuse of lexical items in collocations, etc.The present study sheds some light on the teaching and learning of English writing at colleges in China. It is suggested that to improve the writing quality of Chinese undergraduates, discourse-oriented teaching methods of writing and reading should be adopted.