A Study Of Cohesive Devices In English Compositions By Senior High School Students

For EFL learners, writing skill is considered as one of the most important language skills,owing to the fact that writing reflects writer’s thinking process when they are choosing words,constructing grammatical structure and organizing sentences or paragraphs. It exhibitslearner’s proficiency of English knowledge and their ability to use the language freely andtruly reflects learner’s overall language competence.During the internship, the author found that many problems exist in current Englishwriting instruction, for example, students are seldom exposed to writing methods and skillsby English teachers and they lack systematic and scientific training on English writing. Eventhough doing writing instruction, a majority of English teachers adopt the method of productapproach, namely, a model of “teacher assigns a topic---student writes a paper---teachercorrects papers” which focuses on the final writing result. And paper correction is usuallylimited to errors or mistakes of words, sentences and grammar and neglects the unity andcontent of a text, which leads to students’ ignorance of cohesion and coherence of writing, forthey pay over attention to grammatical structure and word spelling.Based on Halliday&Hasan’s cohesion theory and taxonomy of cohesive devices, thisthesis applies error analysis to textual level and attempts to answer the following threequestions:1. What’s the distribution of cohesive devices used in English compositions of seniorhigh school students?2. What’s the distribution of cohesive errors committed in English compositions ofsenior high school students?3. What’re the causes for these cohesive errors?The author randomly selects50writings as the sample from315English papers ofmonthly examination for students of science class in grade two in one senior high school. Thepresent study will be conducted by combining quantitative and qualitative method along withinterview. Firstly, cohesive ties used in sample writings are identified and coded according toHalliday&Hasan’s taxonomy of cohesive devices and their coding scheme. Secondly, theprocessed material is put into computer and analyzed with software “wordsimith” so as toproduce the distribution of cohesive devices in sample writings. Then the traits of thedistribution are described in a qualitative way. Finally, the author interviews several writers and teachers to explore possible causes for cohesive errors committed in sample writings.The present study shows that lexical cohesion is used most frequently, followed byreference and conjunction. Substitution and ellipsis are barely used in students’ writing.Among all the used lexical cohesive ties, repetition and collocation possess the highestfrequency, so do the errors, particularly errors of preposition collocation. As for reference, thenumber of personal reference ranks the first and demonstrative reference comes next, andlittle comparative reference is used. First personal pronouns are used most frequently and interms of demonstrative reference, the frequency and error rate of definite article is the highest.There are relatively more temporal conjunctions in writings.