An Analysis Of Cohesion And Coherence Errors In College Students' English Writing

English writing has always been considered as the most difficult one among the five basic skills---listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating. For most English learners, it is a great challenge to write a fully-developed and well-organized piece of work. Many college students have already mastered several basic English writing skills, such as to finish some simple writing tasks with vocabularies and grammar they have learned. Although they can write with little lexical and grammatical errors, some common problems still exist in terms of cohesive devices and coherence. It is a task for English teachers to help college students solve those problems and improve their writing.The present thesis, based on Halliday's cohesion theory, lays stress on the analysis of cohesion and coherence errors in college students'English writing. The sample writings are taken from 100 college students who are studying English as a dual degree in Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Both the number of cohesive devices and cohesion errors are calculated, meanwhile the possible causes leading to some of the cohesion errors are provided and analyzed. It is expected that the analysis of cohesion and coherence errors in college students'English writing could strengthen the awareness of students and teachers in using the cohesive devices and achieving the text coherence, and could offer some pedagogical implications in English teaching.The research result indicates that cohesive and coherence errors college students committed in their writing are very common: underuse, misuse and overuse of cohesive devices; incoherence at the sentence, paragraph, and text level; misunderstanding of the given topic, etc. All those errors show that the students'insufficient development in English writing, which calls for teachers, apart from introducing the knowledge of grammar, to emphasize the knowledge of cohesion and coherence and increase the number of those exercises to achieve cohesion and coherence at different levels. Only being aware of the cohesion and coherence of the text can students conduct high-quality compositions.