Lexical Reiteration And The Teaching Of English Writing

Among the four skills in language learning, writing is usually considered to be the last acquired skill and also the most difficult one to command. Because as a language output, writing is based on the comprehensive use of all the other language skills; social-cultural, linguistic and discourse competence will hold a joining influence on the quality of English writing. The complexity of writing also poses as a great obstacle for Chinese students learning English as a foreign language; teaching writing skills has become one of the major focus of English teaching in China. For Chinese students, the difficulty in writing compositions in English lies in producing grammatically correct and semantically meaningful sentences, but for students whose command of English are at the intrmediate level, the even more greater difficulty lies in connecting sentences in a logical and smooth way; that is to achieve cohesion and coherence. Since Halliday and Hasan have stated that cohesion is the foundation of coherence which is the most important prerequisite for the text, cohesion and coherence have been one of the topics attracting widely discussion and study (Halliday and Hasan, 1976). And the results of these discussions and studies on cohesion and coherence by far have provided meaningful implication for the teaching of English writing, especially for solving the cohesive problems students have when they write in English, which have made teachers transfer their teaching focus from grammar to cohesion and coherence, with the emphasis, most often, on the use of reference and conjunction. Aiming at the specific situation in China, where cohesive devices like reference and conjunction are emphasized while lexical devices, especially lexical reiteration, are ignored, this paper tries to prove the importance of lexical reiteration in achieving coherence, and raise teachers' and students' awareness that there is a significant relationship between the use of lexical reiteration and the quality of English writing.To achieve this aim, this paper starts with theoretical review of the concept of cohesion, the relationship between cohesion and coherence and the function of lexical reiteration. And then the principles for the use of lexical reiteration are clarified. After the theoretical background, this paper studies 26 compositions written by English majors in the Branch School of Central China Normal University. Quantitative analysis is utilized to collect the number of cohesive devices used, and the distribution of different cohesive devices used in students writing will be compared with each other. Also students' compositions will be divided into two groups; compositions of group A are better in quality in the aspect of cohesion and coherence, and those of group B are poor in this regard; the distribution of different cohesive devices in these two groups is measured respectively in order to find out the relation between the use of lexical reiteration and the quality of English compositions. Analysis of these data will answer the following research questions.1. How frequently are reference, collocation and conjunction used in English compositions written by students at intermediate level?2. How frequently is lexical reiteration used in students' compositions? Are there any great statistical differences between its frequency and those of other lexical devices in the compositions of students at intermediate level?3. Is there any relationship between the use of lexical reiteration and the quality of students' compositions?The study shows that lexical reiteration, in comparison with other cohesive devices, is the least familiar device to students; for students at intermediate level, it is the use of lexical reiteration that imposes a greater influence on the quality of writing than the use of other cohesive devices. Based on this result, this paper tries to design a systematic teaching method combined with teaching the use of lexical reiteration in writing class. It is hoped that the teaching of lexical reiteration can attract teachers' attention and the application of this device in the teaching of English writing will help students make improvement in writing English compositions.