The Analysis Of Cohesion And Cohesive Errors In College English Writing Of Non-English Majors

With the irreversible tide of globalization, English has become an internationallanguage, which has been widely spread and used in the world. Writing, among the fourlanguage skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing, reflects a learner’scomprehensive expression ability. But, for a long time, it is difficult for students toreach the writing standards required by CET-4which has aroused both teachers andlearners’ concern. For students, the most difficult one doesn’t lie in mastering grammar,but in coherence. Although they can write some compositions meeting the needs ofgrammar and structure, for learners, how to write coherent compositions becomes anurgent problem. In1976, the publication of Coherence in English laid the theoreticalfoundation of coherence of textual level. In this book, Halliday and Hasan point outthat cohesion forms the basis for coherence which lay the vital foundation on the text.Therefore, it is essential that learners should have a good command of cohesivedevices.The study is trying to answer the following three questions(1)What is the frequency of cohesive devices used in the English writings ofnon--English majors?(2)What are the types and frequency of errors committed in using cohesivedevices in the English writings of non--English majors?(3)What is the correlation between the use of cohesive devices and writing qualityin the English writings of non--English majors?By virtue of the theories of cohesion and error analysis, this thesis, based onquantitative and qualitative analysis of corpus, will investigate and analyze the featuresof the use of cohesive devices in order to find out the frequency of each device, thetypes of errors, the traits and the reasons of these errors in their writings which arewritten by60non—English majors.The study indicates that students are likely to adopt various kinds of cohesivedevices in writing. Among the five subcategories of cohesive devices, lexical cohesionhas the highest frequency of use, reference and conjunction rank the second and the third, and ellipsis and substitution are rarely adopted and can be neglected. For errors,the findings, firstly, reveal that the rate of reference errors top the list. Besides, itdoesn’t take much effort to find many errors in using lexical cohesion and conjunction.These errors, including the overuse, the omission and the misuse of reference,conjunction and lexical ties; have a negative impact on text’ coherence. When it comesto the reasons of these errors, students’ negative transfer of the native language,students’ limited number of vocabulary and poor knowledge about the use of cohesionare counted. Finally, the writer analyzes the correlation between the use of cohesiveties and writing quality. The result demonstrates that the correlation between them issignificant. Among the three subcategories of cohesive ties (reference, conjunction andlexical device) lexical devices are highly connected with the writing quality. That is tosay, the more lexical devices were employed, the higher scores students gained. On thecontrary, the use of reference has a negative relationship; with the increase of thenumber of reference, the score decreases accordingly. For future writing, due to theserious situation of the present college English writing teaching and in accordance withthe results, the writer offers some useful suggestions about the systematic introductionof cohesion and about how to help students correctly use cohesive devices in theteaching of English writing.