| Among the four skills in language learning, writing is usually considered to be thelast acquired skill because it is the most difficult. Therefore, Chinese students' English writing has been an issue that attracts the attention of many foreign and Chinese English teachers. 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. Halliday and Hasan(1976)state that cohesion is the foundation of coherence which 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 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.Through a study of 30English argumentative writing written by Chinese learners attending a four-year state university, errors on discourse level are analyzed in light of the theories of cohesion and error analysis. We will make quantitative analysis of the cohesive devices, calculating the numbers of them and the 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.There are three research questions of the study:1. How frequently are cohesive devices used in the sample of compositions?2. What is the relationship between the number of the cohesive ties used and the quality of the compositions?3. What is the frequency of cohesive device errors in the sample of compositions? The present study reveals that the lexical cohesion, as the fundamental elementof writing, plays a significant role in writing. It is also the weakest item for the students because of the highest error proportion among the three cohesion categories. |
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