Application Of Conjunction Cohesion In EFL Writing For College Non-English Majors

Language is a complicated tool used for communication while English writing is one of the five basic skills in communicating.These years,more emphasis on cohesion and text analysis has been placed on teaching English,especially on teaching writing.Halliday is the linguist that first introduced the concept of cohesion in 1962. Later in 1976,Halliday and Hasan published Cohesion in English,in which they considered that text is used in linguistics to refer to any passage,spoken or written,of whatever length,that does form a unified whole.Cohesion occurs where the interpretation of some element in the discourse is dependent on that of another. Conjunction is a word which joins words,phrases,or clauses together,such as but and when.And conjunction is rather different in nature from other cohesive relations such as reference,substitution and ellipsis.Conjunctions are on the borderline of the two:mainly grammatical,but with a lexical component.Halliday and Hasan(1976) categorized conjunctions into four types:additive,adversative,causal and temporal. In conclusion,Halliday and Hasan's concept of conjunction cohesion should be adopted as the framework in this experiment.The present study investigates the use of conjunction cohesion in writing on the basis of text analyses and global scoring of 70 compositions.It analyzes the contrast of scores in pretest and posttest and the overall uses of conjunction cohesion in compositions,and studies the relationship between the frequencies of conjunction cohesion and writing quality.After one semester's training of conjunctions,the posttest was carried out in order to provide the final data for this study.Similar to the pretest,all the subjects were required to take it at the same time and write a composition on the same topic as that they wrote about in the pretest.And then the compositions of the subjects were graded by the same raters of the pretest.Finally,the scores of the posttest were collected and put into computers.According to the contrast of the scores of the writings in the pretest and the posttest,it is found that conjunction cohesion is highly correlated with the quality of writing.At last,the three hypotheses proposed have been testified.The use of conjunction device is significantly correlated with the quality of writing.To conclude,EFL teachers should introduce conjunction cohesion to their students in English writing.What is more,it is advisable that they utilize in teaching writing more specific cohesive devices with the help of model texts.