A Study Of Lexical Cohesion In English Writings By Non-English Majors

The ability of writing in English has aroused such a keen interest among EFL researchers and teachers that a variety of terminologies of correlated linguistic fields have been gradually introduced and applied into EFL writing studies. The notion of good writing is given in many ways. Traditionally, the criteria of a good writing are mainly concerned about grammar, lexis and punctuation. And traditional pedagogy focuses on the control of these pure surface features, i.e. if the writer could write lexico-grammatically correct sentences, all would be well. The college students have had a fundamental command of grammatical knowledge, and they tend to devote much time and efforts to enlarging their vocabulary, believing that rich vocabulary can highly improve the quality of the writing.But all this can not guarantee a real good writing. In Cohesion in English, Halliday and Hasan state that cohesion is the foundation of coherence which is the most important prerequisite for the text and classify five types of cohesive relations. Lexical cohesion, as one of the five relations, plays an important role in text organization. Hoey (1991) argues that lexical patterns are of greater significance in text and cohesive studies are, in part, studies of lexical relation. Therefore, erroneous lexical cohesion tends to be a barrier to composing good writing.The present study attempts to find out and analyze the lexical cohesive errors that commonly occur in college students' compositions. We will make quantitative analysis, calculating the frequency of lexical cohesive devices and the rate of the errors. Qualitative analysis will also be conducted to interpret the sources underlying the errors.There are three research questions of this study:1. How/or in what ways are lexical cohesive devices used in students' writing?2. How frequently are errors made in terms of the use of lexical cohesive devices?3. In what way(s) does lexical cohesion affect college students' English writing quality?The result of this study reveals that the students' writing contains a large amount of attempts at lexical cohesive devices, but their use of these devices in writing is far from satisfying. Errors of repetition and collocation stand out from the rest when lexical cohesion is under careful examination.Therefore, it's recommended in the study that EFL students raise their awareness of lexical cohesion in text and it is the language teachers' task to help them explore a better approach to lexis study.