| As a basic means of communication, writing proves to be one of the hardest skills to acquire, especially for College students, who have learnt English for many years but still fail to write a coherent text. The embarrassing situation in College English writing should be partly attributed to students'weakness in using lexical cohesion effectively.Lexical cohesion, according to Halliday, is achieved via the selection of vocabulary that are related in some way to those that have gone before. Hoey (2000) holds that lexical cohesion is the dominant mode of creating text since it accounts for over forty percent in Halliday and Hasan's frequency analysis of the different types of ties in various texts. Cohesive ties, which run throughout a whole text, can reveal how different parts of a text are related to each other.Lexical cohesion in the present thesis, mainly based on the taxonomy of Halliday & Hasan, is subdivided into six types: repetition, synonymy, antonymy, superordinate, general noun and collocation. And the present study is an attempt to analyze the difference in using the six subtypes of lexical cohesion among the three different samples: the model essay, student essays of higher quality and student essays of lower quality, and explore the relationship between lexical cohesion and writing quality.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 is an introduction to the research, including the background to the research, previous researches conducted both abroad and at home, objective of the research and the significance to conduct this research. Chapter 2 is devoted to the description of writing features and the exploration of thecharacteristics of College English writing. Chapter 3 focuses on the taxonomy of lexical cohesion, which serves as the theoretical framework of the study. Chapter 4 is the analysis of lexical cohesion in the three types of samples. Chapter 5 is the conclusion part, including the limitation of the present research and suggestions for future research.
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