The Analysis Of The Use Of Cohesive Devices And Cohesive Errors In English Writing

The aim of English teaching courses is commonly defined in terms of four basic skills: speaking, listening, reading and writing. The writing skill is often perceived by the learners as the most-difficult-and-hard-to-master one among the four. In China, almost all English teachers and learners are aware of the importance of competent English writing and they spend much time and energy in trying to improve English writing. But the present fact is that writing has still been extremely difficult for English teachers to teach and for learners to acquire and that writing remains as the weakest link among the four basic skills. That's especially true in three-year colleges like Jining University. There the English teachers still focus on grammar, spelling, etc. in English writing teaching.Most college students in China, especially those majored in English, have acquired the basic English writing skills, in some sense. They could finish their writing tasks with little grammatical errors. But a common problem for English learners in China is that they fail to develop their ideas and produce grammatically and meaningfully connected discourses in a way that can be interpreted by readers. They tend to transfer meanings of their native language to English by using Chinese writing strategies, so their articles are full of Chinglish and hard to be interpreted by readers. Many students have difficulties in using grammatical and lexical ties: they just put lots of simple sentences together and don't care whether these sentences cohere or not to each other leaving the readers an impression of discontinuity of coherence. They have a relatively small vocabulary, so they tend to use the same words repeatedly in their writing. Among all the problems, the inadequate use of cohesive devices seems to be a most serious one. In other words, many students have difficulties in producing grammatically and meaningfully connected texts. Their writing, even without grammar errors, would still seem very strange, unnatural and incoherent to read. So how to help college students overcome the problems and produce coherent articles is a great challenge to English teachers in Chinese colleges and researchers alike.Since the publication of Halliday and Hasan's Cohesion in English, cohesion has become progressively assumed in language teaching, and considerable attention has been paid to the function of cohesion in English teaching. Researchers believe that, to be proficient in reading and writing, a good command of language at the level of the sentence is necessary, but not sufficient. A coherent text is more than a series of grammatical sentences lined up one after another. Researchers have done a lot of studies on the relationship between the use of cohesive devices and the quality of English writing by means of quantitative analysis. They have made great achievement in this field. But most of the researches are carried out in some well-known four-year institutions or universities. Both English teachers and students have a strong sense of cohesion and coherence there. In three-year colleges like Jining University, the situations are different. There English writing teaching has still been conducted on the grammatical level. In teaching English writing or correcting students' compositions, many teachers focus on grammar, spelling, etc. Thus the problem of cohesion and coherence is more serious in students' English writing in three-year colleges.The purpose of the present research is to investigate the real use of cohesive devices in the English compositions written by 40 first-year English majors in Jining University, on the basis of the Cohesion Theory and Halliday and Hasan's taxonomy of cohesive devices, making an attempt to identify and quantify the cohesive errors in their compositions. In the analysis of these compositions, the thesis focuses on the errors committed in using cohesive devices and tries to find something in general about those errors. It's expected that the study might lead to a better understanding of the relationship between the use of cohesive devices and quality of writing and find out some effective ways of improving the quality of students' English writing.The thesis consists of 6 chapters. In the first chapter, the problems in Chinese college students' English writing are described, and then the purpose of the study are talked about. Chapter 2 illustrates the nature of English writing and introduces previous researches on cohesion and coherence, especially on the relationship between the use of cohesive devices and the quality of writing, at home and abroad in order to lay a foundation for the thesis. Since the study will apply Cohesion Theory and Halliday and Hasan's taxonomy of cohesive devices to examine the use of cohesive devices and the cohesive errors, Chapter 3 presents the theoretical framework of Cohesion Theory. In this chapter, Halliday and Hasan's taxonomy of cohesive devices and coding scheme are introduced in details. Chapter 4 presents the research methodology as to how the research study will be conducted. Chapter 5 describes and analyses the results. Based on the results, some suggestions are offered as to how to introduce cohesion and coherence into English writing teaching and how to raise students' awareness of cohesion and coherence. In Chapter 6, a conclusion is made. The limitation of the study is talked about in this chapter. Due to some practical reasons, the findings of the study should be tested so as to make inferences.