Effects Of Chinese Negative Transfer On Cohesion And Coherence Of Chinese College Students’ English Writing

Among the four basic skills, writing is regarded as the most difficult one forsecond language learners to master. It is a manifestation of learners’ comprehensiveability and plays an important role in communication. In recent years, writing is givenmore and more importance in different examinations. However, the present situationof Chinese English learners’ writing ability is not satisfying. One of the largest reasonsof this phenomenon is Chinese negative transfer. Hence, this research will focus on theinfluence of Chinese negative transfer on students’ uses of cohesive devices in Englishwritings. It is hoped that this study will help English writing teaching and improveChinese college students’ writing ability.This study is based on Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion theory, and randomlyselected60sampled compositions from Chinese English Learner Corpus. It combinesquantitative analysis and qualitative analysis and aims to answer the followingresearch questions:1. What cohesive devices do students use most frequently in sampled writings?2. How does negative transfer of Chinese affect students’ uses of cohesive devices?3. What is the relationship between the use of cohesive devices and writing quality?The results of the research show that (1) among all the cohesive devices, theuses of reference are the most frequent, followed by reiteration and conjunction, whilesubstitution and ellipsis are the least frequently used;(2) Chinese negative transfer hasgreater effects on students’ uses of grammatical cohesive devices, especially inreference and conjunction, and has smaller effects on their uses of lexical cohesivedevices. Furthermore, Chinese negative transfer has an influence on discoursestructure as well;(3) the use of cohesive devices has a positive relationship withstudents’ writing quality. That phenomenon is especially obvious in respect to lexicalcohesive devices. However, the frequency of using cohesive devices can not accountfor writing quality.Finally, the thesis provides five pedagogical suggestions for teachers and futureresearches.