A Study Of Conjunctional Cohesion In English Writing And Its Implications To Writing Instructions

Teachers normally focus a lot on the syntactical errors of the students' writing. Yet, even without grammatical errors, an essay may still be disorganized due to the lack of coherence, especially lack of proper conjunctions. Therefore, instruction on how to use cohesive words effectively becomes a necessity in writing classes.In this paper, the author cites Halliday's concepts on coherence and cohesion in writing, as well as Dreeler's and Canal's. Following a comprehensive review of the notion of "coherence" and "cohesion", and their relationship, students' writings are studied and analyzed fully when there are problems concerning conjunctional cohesion identified. In order to make the research more persuasive, the author compared the writings of the English writers with those of Chinese students. In the research, the author demonstrates and compares the features of the writings by English writers and Chinese students concerning the use of conjunctions at the discourse level.The author probes into the problems in Chinese students' writings. Besides, the author gave some suggestions to the Chinese students on how to write coherently. They should focus on the effective use of conjunctional cohesion instead of misusing or overusing it.