A Contrastive Study Of Lexical Cohesive Devices In English And Chinese Job Application Letters

This thesis is intended to make a contrastive analysis with regard to the use of lexical cohesive devices in English job application letters written by Chinese and native writers with the guidance of Hoey’s (1991) lexical repetition patterns and Halliday&Hasan’s (1976) cohesion theory so as to find out the similarities and differences in lexical cohesive devices used by Chinese and native writers. Through analyzing the differences between the two groups of English job application letters, it is possible to know the problems of using lexical cohesive devices by Chinese writers. Further analysis may contribute to the possible reasons for the differences and problems. The ultimate purpose of this thesis is to put forward some suggestions for future teaching, which are benefit for English writing, especially this special kind of English writing.The cohesion theory is first proposed by Halliday&Hasan in1976. In their view, cohesive devices are classified into grammatical cohesive devices and lexical cohesive devices, and the latter type is further classified into repetition, synonym/near-synonym, superordinate and collocation. Though lexical cohesion plays greatly important role in constructing a coherent text, they didn’t pay enough attention to that. Besides, their classification is a little more puzzled, especially the concept of collocation. As for this fact, Hoey (1991) made further investigation on lexical cohesive device and he summarized ten types of lexical repetition patterns altogether. Combining the former studies on lexical cohesion, the author summarized a refined taxonomy of lexical cohesive devices for the present study.The research data of the present study include thirty English job application letters written by Chinese writers selected randomly from a book including101English job application letters written by Chinese and the same amount of English job application letters written by native writers from another book which covers100successful English job application letters written by native writers. The two groups of letters form two self-building corpora, one observed corpus and one reference corpus. Firstly, all the lexical cohesive devices in the two corpora are tagged, and with the help of the text analysis software AntConc the raw frequencies of each type of lexical cohesive devices in the two corpora are obtained respectively. Then based on the data got from the previous step the percentage of each kind of lexical cohesive devices among all the lexical cohesive devices used in each corpus can be calculated for general comparison. Third, the keyword list generated by AntConc indicates whether Chinese writers overuse or underuse one or several kinds of lexical cohesive devices when writing. Fourth, to further investigate whether there are significant differences between the two corpora as for every kind of lexical cohesive devices, the author also carried out Chi-square test with the aid of SPSS. The value of Asymp. Sig for each kind of lexical cohesive devices tells as for the use of each type of lexical cohesive devices whether the difference between the two groups is significant or not. To guarantee the two groups of data are comparable, the normed frequencies of each kind of lexical cohesive devices in the two corpora must be calculated before the Chi-square test. Through comparison and analysis, the differences and problems become obvious.The major findings of the present study are as follows:(1) first is the similarity, both Chinese and native writers use all the five kinds of lexical cohesive devices: simple lexical repetition, complex lexical repetition, synonym/near-synonym, superordinate and collocation. Besides, according to the percentages of the devices, both Chinese and native writers use them in the same sequence:collocation, simple lexical repetition, complex lexical repetition, synonym/near-synonym, superordinate. The differences lie in the following two aspects:(2) Chinese writers underuse collocation and simple lexical repetition but overuse complex lexical repetition.(3) Chinese writers tend to use certain limited amount of vocabularies to form a certain kind of lexical cohesive device.The study puts forward the following three suggestions for teaching:teachers should introduce cohesion theory to students consciously to raise students’awareness of text coherence; teachers introduce the differences between English and Chinese language, avoiding the negative transfer of mother tongue; teach the vocabularies in context and discourse but do not teach words isolated, making students grasp not only the meaning but also the usage of the vocabularies.