Comparison Of Discourse Cohesion Between English Chinese-as-Foreign-Language Learners Of Different Proficiency Based On HSK Corpus

As discourse teaching gains more and more attention, researches in this field also reflect a growing significance. This research chose200test compositions written by students taking English as the first language from HSK Composition Corpus.100of them were from students getting B degree, who were identified as students with high proficiency, while the other100compositions were from C degree students, those with low proficiency. This comparison research was conducted between compositions from the two groups-the high-level group and the low-level group, based on the three aspects of discourse cohesion:grammatical method, lexical device, and logical connector. The research results revealed that reference which belongs to grammatical device is the most common cohesion error in students’compositions. The low-level students tended to make mistakes on ellipsis and substitutions while the high-level on lexical cohesion. Furthermore, differences could also be found in error type between the two groups. Low-level students would use reference whose objects could not be found, and the high-level students often have reference ellipsis. Based on the research results, the researcher made several suggestions for discourse teaching.