A Study Of Chinese English Majors' Use Of Cohesive Devices In Their Oral Productions Driven By The Testing Task Of Making Comments

This study investigates the use of cohesive devices by the Chinese EFL learners in their oral comments on a given topic in a testing situation. It seeks to describe the general characteristics of the use of cohesive devices, and examine the differences in the use of cohesive devices across different levels of L2 learners, and finally find out the relationship between the use of cohesive devices and L2 learners'oral performance.The material employed in the present study was taken from SWECCL, a Chinese EFL learner corpus. The sampled 26 cases were divided into higher- and lower-level groups according to the scores of comment-making task the test-takers obtained in the TEM-8 oral test. The conceptual framework followed in this study was based on Halliday and Hasan's (1976) classification of cohesive devices. The frequency of cohesive devices used by the test-takers was calculated and analyzed statistically by SPSS. The major findings yielded in the study may be summarized as follows:Firstly, reference enjoys the highest frequency of use of all the identified major types of cohesive devices, and there are only a few instances of substitution and ellipsis but their number is too small to draw any meaningful conclusion. Of all the subtypes of the major types, repetition was used most frequently by the test-takers, reflecting the oral characteristics shared by L2 learners, on the one hand, and their lack of lexical variety, on the other. Demonstrative reference enjoys the pattern similar to repetition, which is, as some of case analysis indicated, related to the excessive use of the definite article the.Secondly, the independent-samples T-test analysis reveals that there is significant difference in the use of lexical cohesion, which suggests that the higher-level speakers are more capable of producing the coherent discourses. The difference in the use of lexical cohesion was found to be related to more synonyms (or synonymous items) by the higher-level speakers in comparison with the excessive use of repetition by the lower-levels.Thirdly, as revealed in the Pearson correlation analysis, the minor type of synonym is positively correlated with the test-takers'oral performance. Linear regression analysis indicates that synonym has a relatively strong predicting power to the test-takers'oral performance, suggesting that synonym potentially become one of the indicators to Chinese EFL learners'oral proficiency.The findings generated from this study may have the following pedagogical implication: Similar to the situation in the written productions, the use of cohesive devices is equally important in organizing the oral discourses. To develop the learners'discourse competence, L2 teachers should raise the learners'awareness of proper use of cohesive devices, for example, by providing the learners with exercises of oral compositions to practice using lexical variety to achieve the highest degree of coherence in their oral productions.