Improving Writing Skills Of Senior Students In Baiyin No.1 High School

Lexical cohesion is the cohesion that arises from semantic relationships between words (Halliday and Hasan, 1976). It is an important device to bond sentences together across text and build up a coherent discourse. Lexical cohesion indicates overall writing ability. It enables writers to introduce a concept in one sentence and to extend, modify, or clarify that concept in subsequent texts. (Witt & Failgley, 1981). Using Halliday and Hasan's framework and types of Lexical Cohesion, in this study, an experiment was designed to apply the technique of lexical cohesion to explore a new approach that could help to improve senior students' writing skills. The study proposed the followinghypothesis: Training students to use lexical cohesion can improve their writing skills.The thesis consists of six chapters:In Chapter 1, the background, purpose and significance of the present study were expressed.In Chapter 2, firstly, Halliday and Hasan' (1976) theory on lexical cohesion was introduced. Then the relationship between lexical cohesion and writing were presented, and at the same time Michael Hoey's mode (1991) for measuring links and bonds betweensentences was introduced. Finally, the research questions were put forward.Chapter 3 reviewed researches on lexical cohesion and the relationship between lexical cohesion and writing quality.Chapter 4 reported an experimental research on writing course. 120 subjects (including 65 boys and 55 girls) chosen from two parallel senior 2 classes of Baiyin No.1 High School participated the experiment, which lasted 8 weeks. Students attended class daily and followed the syllabus used in the regular course. Twice a week (45- minute lesson each) during their evening class, the students from the EC were received writing instruction. The scores from the pretest and posttest were analyzed using t-test, Neuner's mode for analyzing cohesive ties and chains in students' essays and Hoey's mode (1991) for measuring links and bonds between sentences.Chapter 5 discussed the results of the experiment. The results revealed that studentsfrom EC had improved moderately in the use of cohesive ties and lexical chains to develop the topic in their essays.Chapter 6 drew a conclusion to the significance of the present study in EFL teaching and learning, pointed out its limitations, and put forward some suggestions for future researches.