A Study Of Lexical Cohesion In College English Writing

Among the four basic skills of English language learning:listening, speaking, reading and writing, writing is usually considered as the most complex and difficult one. Despite large amount of time and energy poured into English writing, writing still remains extremely difficult for English teachers to teach and for learners to acquire. There are many problems in students’English writings, yet the most serious one is the use of cohesive devices. Halliday and Hassan point out, "cohesion is the foundation of coherence" (1976:13). This study sets out to investigate whether the training of the use of lexical cohesive devices can help improve students’writing proficiency.In the study,40 students are chosen from each group for the collection of three types of data:the scores of composition as well as the numbers of lexical cohesive devices of compositions in the pretest, two practice writings and the posttest. The software SPSS is employed to process the data.According to the data analysis, the current research has the following findings: Firstly, after the training of the use of lexical cohesive devices, students do improve their writing quality. Secondly, there is significant difference in the use of synonym, antonym and collocation between the CG and the EG. Thirdly, synonym, antonym and collocation are greatly correlated with students’writing quality; while repetition, superordinate and general words are not significantly correlated with the quality of writing. The paper comes to a conclusion that the use of lexical cohesive devices does improve the quality of English writing and the lexical cohesive devices can be grasped through training. Therefore, it is necessary for teachers to apply the lexical cohesion to the teaching of writing. It is also important for students to realize the collection between the lexical cohesion and writing quality so as to strengthen their awareness of using lexical cohesive devices.