Error Analysis Of The Use Of Cohesive Devices In Non-English Major Graduate Students' English Writing And The Corresponding Strategies

English writing is one of the four basic skills that an English learner should have and that is indispensable link to the process of teaching English as a foreign language. Being the most difficult one among the four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing, it has attracted the attention of many foreign and Chinese teachers of English. The ability to write in English is even more important to graduate students because international academic exchanges call for theoretical articles published in English. There is no need to give down-to-the-last detail reasons. According to Halliday and Hasan (1976), cohesion is the foundation of coherence that is the most important prerequisite for the text. Therefore, quite a few have examined the role of this theory and scored a certain achievements in teaching the students how to write. Not many studies have been done, however, in the field of writing instruction for the graduate students who are non-English majors. That is why this sort of research has been carried out, which is a databased error analysis (EA for short) of 38 non-English majors at their graduate's level in their 38 argumentative compositions in English. Based on the cohesion theory of Halliday and Hasan, EA is directed to the cohering problems at the discourse level. Investigations are made by means of questionnaires distributed among 200 non-English majors who are graduate students in order to find out to what a degree they know cohesion theory and what sort of attitude they are taking toward this theory. The purpose of investigation is to provide reference data for the English composition teaching of those graduate students. And corpus analysis rested on the 38 compositions attempts to make out the cohesion problems the graduate students are confronted with and why the problems have occurred in their compositions. Both qualitative and quantitative analysis are employed in this research.This dissertation is composed of five chapters. The gist of each chapter are described as follows:Chapter One, Introduction, describes the background and the scope of the study.Chapter Two, Literature Review, represents the theoretical background of the study, including the definition of'cohesion'and'coherence', the description of the relationship between cohesion and discourse coherence, and the detailed introduction of EA theory, with the author's brief comment on the theory at the close of this chapter. They are the major premise of what are dealt with in Chapter Three and Four.Chapter Three relates first to the survey then to the statistical analysis of the data. This chapter begins with a survey in which the data are colleted from the questionnaire among 200 first-year graduate students who are non-English majors at Guangxi Normal University, and 187 valid ones have been retrieved. The results have shown that learners'knowledge of cohesion is far form being as good as it should be. Moreover, the graduate students are not able to use consciously cohesive devices in English writing. Then it introduces the collecting method and process of the data as well as the categorization of cohesion devices according to Halliday and Hasan's theory, and then analyzes the cohesion errors, on the basis of EA theory. The results indicate that learners have problems in using personal and demonstrative references, conjunctions, repetition, and general words, which destroy the coherence of text seriously. The error resources include negative transfer of their mother language, overgeneralization, and induction of teaching, etc.Chapter Four is implication and suggestions. Basing on the results of the survey as done in Chapter Three, the author offers some suggestions on how to teach English writing. In brief, it is advisable and necessary to impart the knowledge related to the cohesive strategies to the students in classroom teaching of composition. And this, the author believes, can be realized. Some suggestions for further study of cohesion problem have been put forward at the end of this chapter.Chapter Five is where the Conclusion of this dissertation arrives at. According to the data analysis and the survey, the conclusion is that the cohesion errors hurt the quality of the writing to a serious extent. So far, the non-English majors at their graduate level have not grasped the cohesion theory as they should. We teachers of College English have not had an optimistic picture in this aspect. Therefore, it is of practical significance to inoculate the students with the related knowledge so as to improve their ability to write in English. It is a matter of importance that cannot be undervaluable. Since such a research is carried out on a small scale, no wonder that there exist some defects. There is still much room for further explanation of the issues in relevance to practice in cohesion.