A Contrastive Study On Corpus-based Lexical Cohesion Between CET4and CET6Writings

Writing is one of important language skills in English learning. It is usually used as an important means ofmeasurement to examine the student s English proficiency in CET4and CET6test. Cohesion proposed byHalliday and Hasan(1976) has a strong relation with writing quality. And lexical cohesion is one of mostimportant cohesive ties, which consists of about fifty percent of all cohesion. Many foreign and Chineseresearchers have also tested that the use of lexical cohesive ties is closely related to the writing quality.The framework of lexical cohesion adopted in this research is mainly based on Halliday and Hasan sclassification(1976,1984), and made some modification according to Hoey s classification(1991). This researchmainly examines the differences of lexical cohesive ties between CET4and CET6writings, including simplerepetition, complex repetition, synonym, antonym, hyponym, collocation and general words. Based on theChinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC),33CET4and30CET6samples are randomly selected from ST3sub-corpus and ST4sub-corpus respectively to analyze the use of lexical cohesive ties by college non-Englishmajor students, intending to explore the following questions:(1) Which lexical cohesive ties are the most commonly used, and which ones are the least used inCET4and CET6writings respectively?(2) What are the differences in number of lexical cohesion between CET4and CET6writings?(3) Are there differences in types of lexical cohesive ties between CET4and CET6writings?The results show that(1) in all seven devices, the most frequent lexical cohesive ties used in CET4samples are simple repetition,collocation, and synonym, and in CET6samples are simple repetition, synonym and collocation. Whilethe least used lexical cohesive ties in CET4sample writings are hyponym, general words, antonym andcomplex repetition, and in CET6are hyponym, complex repetition, general words, and antonym.Although there has difference in order, the distribution is approximately the same.(2) The total number of ties used in samples increases in general from CET4to CET6writing，which has asignificant difference. For the subcategories of lexical cohesion, there exist significant differences insimple repetition, synonym, antonym and collocation between CET4and CET6sample compositions.There are not significant differences in complex repetition, hyponymy and general word.(3) The types of cohesive ties used in CET6are more than in CET4, but there has not significant difference.The present research can help teachers have a better understanding of the characteristics of Chinese collegenon-English major students adoption of lexical cohesion in CET4and CET6Writings. Teachers shouldconsciously increase the explanations and exercises of cohesion in their teaching practice, especially, lexicalcohesion, to develop and improve students writing ability using a variety of flexible and appropriate vocabulary.Eventually, it will make the students use cohesive ties, especially lexical cohesion, consciously in their writing.