A Study Of Cohesive Ties Employed In CET-6 Writing By Chinese College Students

Writing plays a very important role in daily communication, yet for Chinese college students, it is annoying when they are asked to write an English composition and it is difficult for them to make their writings in good cohesion. So, this paper is to survey the cohesive ties employed in CET—6 writing written by Chinese college students and hope to obtain some implications for their future English learning.This paper mainly adopts Halliday and Hasan's(1976/2001) category of cohesive ties as theoretical basis, while the category of Huang Guowen's (1988) and Hoey's (1991/2000) would be partially discussed to make amendments to the list of cohesive ties for the study.The data of this study are 60 compositions of CET—6 test (June, 1997) randomly selected from the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC). Compositions are divided into two groups according to the grading criterion of CET—6 writing, namely the lower-score group (LG), which contains compositions scored from 7 to 9, and the higher-score group (HG), which contains those scored from 10 to 12.Based on a survey of the previous studies, this paper attempts to answer the following research questions.(1) How frequently are the cohesive ties employed in compositions of the two groups?(2) According to the sub-categories of cohesive ties for the present study, how are they specifically employed in the compositions of the two groups?(3) What's the relation between the frequency of using cohesive ties and the quality of writing?By using both quantitative and qualitative approaches, the final results show that: (1) In both the two groups, reference ties account for the largest percentage, followed by lexical and conjunctive ties. Substitution and ellipsis are underused and misused. (2) Personal reference constitutes most of reference ties. Third person pronouns are overused and there are frequent shifts between plural form and singular form. Ties of clausal reference are employed by both groups. Students of the higher-score group perform better in using comparative reference. (3) Additive and causal conjunctives are mostly used, followed by adversative conjunctives. Temporal conjunctives are rare to be seen. There is little variation of conjunctives with only a small number of them overused. Misuse of conjunction can be seen among all the four sub-categories. (4) Simple repetition constitutes the largest percentage of lexical cohesion. Synonym ranks second, followed by complex repetition and antonym. Hyponymy and general word are seldom used. The employment of collocation is not as good as expected. (5) Students perform well in using parallel structure. (6) When we judge the quality of a composition, we should not only consider the frequency of using cohesive ties. It could not be the decisive factor. We should also consider the qualitative results as whether these ties are properly used.This paper also points out that Chinese college students are weak in basic grammar points, and lack the sense of language. Besides, their vocabulary is very small, which makes the wording restricted in their writing. At last, the author gives two pieces of advice: (1) To engage in a large amount of reading of English materials. It could enhance the sense of language. Consequently, students could avoid making mistakes in using reference and conjunctives and can better use substitution and ellipsis. (2) To form a habit of using dictionaries with both Chinese and English explanation. Thus, the subtle difference between synonyms could be perceived. Students can understand the words thoroughly and enlarge the vocabulary. Consequently, they can take advantage of more synonyms, antonyms, and even hyponyms instead of simple repetition. As a result, the wording would be much better and the writing would become more coherent and natural.