An Experimental Study Of Conjunctive Elements In Non-English Major College Students’ Writing

As one of the basic skills of learning English, writing is an important sign of the learner’s language proficiency, but often perceived to be the most difficult one. The scoring criteria of writing task in CET-4 makes it clear that cohesion and coherence of the composition is a very important factor for achieving a high score. However, many college English teachers find that quite a number of their students’compositions are unreadable though some of them may make lexically and grammatically good sentences. Students don’t pay enough attention to cohesion and coherence in writing, whereas teachers don’t give enough instructions especially on cohesion and coherence of an essay.Based on the cohesion theory and Halliday and Hasan’s taxonomy of conjunctive elements, an experimental research is conducted to investigate how the use of conjunctive elements influences the writing quality after special instruction and training among non-English major college students. The subjects of the study are from two classes of third-semester non-English major college students in a university of Shandong. The whole process of the experiment includes an interview for teachers, a questionnaire for students, two tests (pre-test and post-test) and scoring, giving the instruction and training of using conjunctive elements, and data analysis and results reporting. The study attempts to answer the following questions:1. What are the major problems in college English writing class related to cohesion & coherence? 2. What fruits does the training produce in teaching students to use conjunctive elements? 3. What are the improvements of students’ compositions in using conjunctive elements after the training?The major findings of the present study are as follows:1) Though most teachers notice that cohesion & coherence influences the writing quality, not enough guidance nor sufficient writing practice is given to students.2) After the training, most of the students have attached much importance to English writing and cohesion & coherence of a composition and have learned to use the common expressions of each type of conjunctions in writing.3) Students tend to use more various conjunctive elements with higher accuracy rate after certain instruction and training; most students write more coherent compositions with correct use of conjunctive elements and accordingly, their English writing quality and their scores are improved. As revealed in this study, all the research questions have been answered and all the hypotheses have been confirmed. So it can be concluded that the instruction and the training of using conjunctive elements is feasible and helpful in college English writing. Therefore, both teachers and students should pay close attention to the correlation between conjunction cohesion and English writing. English teachers should introduce cohesion theory in class and devise exercises concerning conjunctive elements in a systematic way so as to cultivate students’ acquisition of these cohesive devices and strengthen their ability of using them. It is hoped that the findings could have some pedagogical implications for both teachers and students in college English writing.