Comparative Study Of The Conjunction Device In English And Chinese And Its Application In English Writing Teaching

Coherence and cohesion has become an important aspect of evaluating writing nowadays. As one of the cohesive devices, conjunction is divided, based on its logico-semantic relation by Halliday, into elaboration, extension and enhancement with several subdivisions of each in his work An Introduction to Functional Grammar (Halliday, 1985).Following Halliday's theory, the thesis has done the following three jobs. Firstly, it finds the differences and similarities of conjunction device between English and Chinese. Secondly, by the way of corpora analysis, it finds the differences between good English compositions and bad ones in respect of the usage of conjunction; and what the reasons for conjunction errors and coherent failures in those bad writings are. Thirdly, it gives some suggestions on usage of conjunction device in English writing for teachers and students of English. The study is both applied and practical because a) theory on conjunction in Systematic Functional Linguistics is used as the theoretical framework when exploring problems on conjunction device in writing; b) some suggestions are made which may be of help to teachers and students to improve writing competence. During the research, both qualitative approach and quantitative approach are used.Although there are a lot of papers and dissertations discussing coherence and cohesion, the majority of them talks about lexical cohesion, reference, substitution and ellipsis. Conjunction, the most different cohesive device between the two languages, has not been attached enough importance to. In the present thesis, conjunction is studied as a cohesive device for comparison between English and Chinese. This is one original point of the present study. Another one is its close connection with teaching practice as papers on conjunction published so far are mainly concerned with translation research.Probing into conjunction usage in writing, the thesis has got its new findings in two aspects. 1. There is close relationship between usage of conjunction and quality of writing. With a quantitive method, the writer finds that they two are closely related in two aspects: a) the quantity of conjunction (effective ones) used in an essay is directly proportional to the quality of it; b) the quality of conjunction used in an essay is directly proportional to the quality of it. 2. Three problems in respect of conjunction usage have also been found in the study: a) lack of conjunction in places where it is necessary; b) misuse of conjunctive elements; c) overuse of some individual conjunctive elements. Based on the statistics, causes for the problems are analyzed from language, teaching method and learner, three aspects. Firstly, on the language's aspect, it is caused by negative transfer of one's native language. As a result of hypotaxis of English and parataxis of Chinese, sometimes learners of English will use less conjunction devices as well as make errors when using them. Secondly, on the aspect of teaching method or teachers, conjunction is taught traditionally as lexical item on the sentence level; however, as one of the cohesive devices, it plays its role on discourse or at least paragraph level. This difference should have been noticed and emphasized in teaching process. So it is the deficiency in discourse based teaching that partly results in shortage and misusage on conjunction. Thirdly, on learners'part, it is shown in the data that a great many errors on conjunction are made because of confusion of different types of logical relations. There are five chapters in the thesis, besides Introduction which gives a general idea of the backgrounds of the research, the development of concerned theory, aim and content of the research and method adopted in the research. Chapter One is a discussion of the theoretical background. Chapter Two is concerned with the theory of conjunction, not only about the basic classification of conjunction in Halliday's theory of cohesion, but also the comparative study of English and Chinese on it.Chapter Three and Chapter Four are the main body of the thesis. In Chapter Three, methodology used in the research are illustrated, including objectives, method, subjects, procedure, and process of the data. In Chapter Four, the most important part of the thesis, by analyzing the result of the research carried out in Chapter Three, problems on conjunction usage and the causes for them are discussed; at the same time, some ways of improving conjunction usage and writing competence are provided to EFL teachers as applicable and practical tactics in English writing teaching. The last chapter is conclusions of the thesis, including a summary of the content, new findings, limitations of the study and direction for further research in this field.