Lexical Cohesion And Senior High School Students' Writing Quality

This thesis aims to study the difference between high mark group (HG) and low mark group (LG) students in using lexical cohesion, and whether lexical cohesion has something to do with the quality of Chinese EFL senior high school students'writing.From abroad to home, there are many researchers who study lexical cohesion, such as Halliday, Hasan, Hoey, Hu Zhuanglin, Zhu Yongsheng, Miao Xingwei, Zhang Delu and so on. Among them Hoey makes the greatest contribution to the study of lexical cohesion especially to repetition. These scholars have their own categories of lexical cohesion ties, but Hoey's and Hu Zhuanglin's classifications are most acceptable. The detailed classifications will be listed in this thesis. The thesis will make the study in combination with their categories, that is, it mainly focuses on simple lexical repetition (SR), complex lexical repetition (CR), synonym (SN), antonym (AN) and general words (GW).Although many studies give emphasis to the relationship between lexical cohesion and writing quality, they most focus on college students; most of them do the research based on the essays from CET-4 and CET-6. However, they actually make a great contribution to the research of lexical cohesion and find that there is some connection between lexical reiteration and the quality of English composition. However, there are no statistics and research proving that such connection does exist in senior high school students'compositions and in the specific usage of each lexical cohesive tie; so, this thesis will focus on the senior high school students'compositions; meanwhile, it makes some comparison with others'researches. The result of this study shows that lexical cohesion has a great impact on writing quality, that senior high school students tend to use a lot of lexical repetitions to reach the purpose of cohesion, and that high mark students use more lexical repetitions than low mark students. This result will bring some enlightenment to senior high school's writing teaching. In addition, the thesis gives some suggestions on the teaching of lexical cohesion, as well as suggestions for developing learners' awareness of using lexical cohesion.