A Corpus Approach To Cohesive Devices In Chinese EFL Writing

From the perspective of the nature of writing, cohesion occupies an essential position. It helps to create organized texts and conveys comprehensible information to the reader. Many researchers have done great work at exploring the association between the use of cohesive devices and the quality of writing produced. However, the results of various studies prove to be inconsistent. In order to gain more insight into this field, this research examines the situation of English majors’use of cohesive devices in writing and to what degree the correct use of cohesive features indicating writing quality. The whole thesis is following Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion theory (1976) and taxonomy of cohesive devices (including reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion).All the samples analyzed in the present study are collected from Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (WECCL), one of the sub-corpora of Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (SWECCL2.0). With20pieces from each grade (from Grade1to Grade4), an analysis of80argumentative compositions of the same topic collected from English majors is carried out. After the tagging work and scoring work of all the sampled compositions, results are collected for diverse analytical purposes with the help of statistical software. Through independent samples t-test, the author discusses significant differences concerning the use of cohesive devices between the high-quality compositions and the low ones. Moreover, the relationship between the use of cohesive devices and writing quality are examined. Through exploring the using situation of cohesion by Chinese English majors, the thesis provides a general view of cohesive features in Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) leaners’writing.The research results reveal that EFL learners at different proficiency levels have the tendency of using various cohesive devices in their writing; reference forms the largest percentage of the total number of cohesive devices by English majors except Grade4, followed by conjunctions and lexical cohesion; significant difference between high-quality compositions and the low ones in the use of substitution, conjunction and lexical cohesion is observed while no statistically significant difference is found between two groups in the use of reference and ellipsis; in addition, results obtained with the help of statistical software prove that the correct use of cohesive devices is correlated positively with writing quality, regardless of the EFL proficiency levels.During the writing instruction of College English, teachers should pay close attention to the use of cohesive devices in order to help students improve their writing level. The study highlights possible implications for EFL writing theory and pedagogy and provides referential value to related research of cohesion.