An Empirical Study On The Application Of Lexical Cohesion Theory In EFL Writing Teaching

As one of the basic skills in language learning, writing is an indispensable part in the teaching of a foreign language. But at present, English writing teaching in China still focuses on sentence level but not on text level. Whether the teaching of lexical cohesion contributes to the improvement of writing ability has been studied by many linguists, but their conclusions are not consistent. Taking these into account, the author decides to conduct an empirical study to explore whether teaching students to use lexical cohesion can improve their writing skills, and it is expected that this study will provide reference data for the pedagogical reform of English writing teaching.The theoretical basis of the present study is Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theory. Halliday and Hasan (Halliday & Hasan, 1976) claim that cohesion is "a semantic relation between an element in the text and some other element that is crucial to the interpretation of it". In Cohesion in English (Halliday & Hasan, 1976), Halliday and Hasan hold that there are two ways of creating cohesion in a text: grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. Grammatical cohesion consists of reference, ellipsis, substitution and conjunctions. Lexical cohesion is divided into two broad types: reiteration and collocation. A reiteration item may be a repetition, a synonym or near-synonym, a superordinate, or a general word. The focus of the present research is lexical cohesion. According to Halliday and Hasan, lexical cohesion is the single most important form of cohesive tie and makes up of about forty percent of the total. The subjects of the study are two classes of sophomore non-English majors in Century College, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. The objectives of the study are to explore: (a)whether the teaching of lexical cohesion is possible; (b)whether the teaching of lexical cohesion contributes to the improvement of students' writing ability; (c)which cohesive devices have a significant relationship with the quality of students' writing.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One is an introduction to the research, including the importance of English writing and the organization of the thesis. In Chapter Two, firstly theory on cohesion and lexical cohesion is introduced. Chapter Three also reviews previous researches both abroad and at home. Then the relationship between lexical cohesion and writing are presented. Chapter Three describes how this research is conducted and how the data is collected. It consists of the objectives, subjects, research questions, hypothesis, instrument, scoring and procedures. Chapter Four focuses on the data analysis and corresponding discussion of the present research. It is concluded that (1)Training students to use lexical cohesion does improve their writing skills. (2)There is significant difference in the use of synonym, antonym and collocation between the CC and EC. Essays of the EC employ more synonyms, antonyms and collocations. However there is no significant difference in the use of repetition, superordinate and general words between the two classes. (3)Synonym, antonym and collocation are significantly correlated with the quality of students' writing. Repetition superordinate and general words are not significantly correlated with the quality of writing. Chapter Five summarizes the present research and its main findings. This chapter also points out the limitations of the present research and puts forward some suggestions for future researches.