Analysis Of Cohesive Errors In Senior High School Students' English Writing

English writing has been regarded as an important and difficult part for quite a long time; writing is relatively more complicated compared with other skills such as listening, speaking and reading. The English writing of high school students has attracted more attention. Every year the last section of the College Entrance Examination paper is writing and the paper selected from most of the provinces contain two parts with a large portion of marks. It thus can be concluded that English writing is an important means of evaluation the students'English level. However, the high school students'English writing level is low in general, for in the case of the writing part in the College Entrance Examination having 25 as full mark; the average mark of the students is 14, which is below 15, the passing line. There are a large number of reasons for the low grade of high school students, one of which is the lack of cohesion, that is the coherence in content. Consequently, the use of cohesive devices in English compositions has become the focus for many scholars both at home and abroad. The book Cohesion in English written by Halliday and Hasan (1976) has discussed the theory of cohesion, the relationship between cohesion and language structure. Cohesion and coherence has become a vital concept of discourse analysis, which has drawn much more attention.This thesis is based on cohesion theory and error analysis theory, having analyzed the cohesive errors in high school students'compositions. This paper collects 50 samples randomly from the compositions written by Grade Three students of the High School Attached to Northeast Normal University, applying cohesion theory and error analysis theory to the study, analyzing all types of cohesive errors in their writings and obtaining a variety of data. After this procedure, the results are explained to the students, trying to let them have a good command of cohesion theory, the application of cohesive devices to writing and the cohesive errors occurring in their writings. After a month's digestion of what they have been explained, those students are required to write a composition for the second time. Similarly, 50 samples are collected from the second round writing for analysis and the data is obtained. The next step is to compare the rate of errors of all types respectively between the two phases of writings, which is to certify that the analysis on cohesive errors is of great help and use in the improvement of high school students'writings. The result of this study proves that the cohesive errors commonly consist in the writings of high school students, which is one of the main reasons for the low grade of their English writings. This has played an important part in English teaching in high school. This thesis suggests that the use of cohesive devices be applied into English teaching; more attention should be paid to the cohesion and coherence of in a writing when teaching writing class and evaluate students'writings, not merely focusing on a single word or pure grammar. Teaching cohesion theory to students has realistic significance for the improvement of high school students'writings. Considering that this study belongs to a research in a limited area, it is unavoidable to have some weaknesses, therefore, it asks for further research concerning practice problems.