Use Of Cohesive Devices In College English Writing Of Non-English Majors

Writing, as one of the four basic skills in language learning, is usually considered as the most complex and the most difficult one. It's also one of the most important abilities for college students both in China and abroad. In spite of large quantities of time and energy spent in English writing, the writing performances are still far from satisfactory. As Halliday and Hasan point out, "cohesion is the foundation of coherence" (1976:13). This study sets out to investigate the use of cohesive devices in the English writing of non-English majors to improve our teaching of English writing.What kind of characteristics does a good writing have? How to write coherent and grammatically-correct compositions? These are all focal points of English language teaching. Researchers at home and abroad have done a lot in the field of cohesion in students'compositions. It is found that grammatical mistakes cover a large proportion of the mistakes in EFL learners'writing. However, even if all the grammatical mistakes are corrected, the sentences are still disconnected with each other, and the meaning of the writing is still incoherent and hard to understand. That is to say, to read such compositions, readers often feel frustrated (Wang Yuwen & Zhang Peng,2003).The present study sets out to investigate the use of cohesive devices in the English writing of non-English majors by examining one hundred out of three hundred and sixty sample compositions written by non-English major sophomores in four schools of two universities. And then all the compositions are further divided into two groups-high quality and low quality,50 for each group. After a detailed analysis and discussion with sample examples, the thesis shows that the use of cohesive devices can be of great help to good compositions, and sums up with some implications and approaches commonly used in writing class to improve quality of English writing.The research attempts to answer the following three questions:1. How are cohesive devices used in the English writing of non-English majors?2. What is the relationship between cohesive devices and writing quality? 3. What are the implications for the teaching of English writing?By analyzing the frequency of cohesive ties used in high quality group and low quality group, the present paper finds that the high quality group adopts a bigger number and more types of cohesive devices while the low quality group adopts fewer cohesive devices either in number or in types. What's more, in high quality group reference is the most often used type of cohesive device, lexical reiteration the second and lexical collocation the third. While in low quality group, lexical reiteration is the most often used type of cohesive device, followed by reference and conjunction. The samples in both groups do not contain a significant number of cases of substitution and ellipsis, especially in low quality group, substitution and ellipsis are not commonly used in the compositions. It also reveals that students-especially less competent students do not have a clear idea about the use of cohesive devices, and they are badly in need of knowledge and skills in this aspect and supposed to be trained with these skills.The paper comes to the conclusion that proper use of cohesive devices contributes to the quality of English writing and that all the cohesive devices can be mastered by training. Therefore, it is necessary for both teachers and EFL learners to pay close attention to the relationship between cohesion and English writing so as to strengthen the awareness of using cohesive devices. Besides, Systematic training with exercises on the use of cohesive devices and more writing practice are of great significance to the improvement of English writing quality of non-English majors.