Lexical Cohesion In The English Writing Of Chinese Senior High School Students

Cohesion, as one of the most important components of a text, has aroused the interests of many linguists and scholars. Cohesion is divided into two general categories: grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. Lexical cohesion is the dominant mode of creating texture, which has closely related to writing quality. Recently, writing section in NMET is becoming more and more important: complex structures and varied words are encouraged to be used in the composition instead of avoidance of them. This tendency shows that more stress has been placed on lexical cohesive devices in the students' composition.The present study is based on compositions written by 137 senior high school students from Fuzhou No.4 High School and PingDong Middle School in Fujian province. The compositions are divided into high group (30 samples) and low group (30 samples). According to the suggested framework by Hu Zhuanglin's (1994) and Zhu Yongsheng's (2001) classification, the current thesis attempts to analyze the lexical cohesive devices used in senior high school students' writings. By means of SPSS 15.0, Independent Sample T-tests are conducted to get the statistical analyses of the differences between the groups in using lexical cohesion ties. Correlations are also conducted to get the statistical analyses of the relationship between lexical cohesion and writing quality.The finding suggests that it is necessary to introduce students some basic concept of cohesion, coherence and the usage of cohesive devices, to bring lexical devices into the textual level, and to make EFL learners aware of the difference of lexical cohesion between English and Chinese writing. The author hopes that the investigation of students' lexical cohesive devices would shed light on significant pedagogical implications for teachers and researchers who are interested in establishing a new model for TEFL.