A Study On The Use Of Cohesive Devices In Senior High School Students’ English Writing

With the ever-increasing collaborations with foreign countries in the fields of politics, economy and culture, the learning of English has become more and more important for us Chinese people. It is known that listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating comprise the five basic language skills in the learning of English, and among which writing ranks as the most difficult one for Chinese students. As a process of language output, writing is a complex creative mental activity which calls for the comprehensive application of abundant knowledge and skills. How to write a sentence that is meaningful and consistent with grammatical rules? And how to link independent sentences to make a compact and logical discourse are by no means easy for senior high school students. Problems such as semantic inconsistencies, improper arrangements of words and sentences exist in students’ English writing. Sometimes there is no logical structure or outstanding theme in a composition (Liu,2013). Therefore, the cultivation of students’ English writing ability is a significant task for both teachers and students.The cohesion theory, which was established by Halliday and Hasan in 1976 with the publication of Cohesion in English, provided a convenient theoretical foundation for researchers to study on discourse. Halliday and Hasan (1976:13) pointed out that cohesion is the basis for coherence, and coherence is the most important prerequisite for the formation of discourse. Kent (1992:190) maintained that cohesion and coherence is a crucial principle for the creation of discourse. Previous studies have shown that the quality of English writing is intimately related to the use of cohesive devices (Song,2002; Huang,2013).Taking the significance of English writing for Chinese students and the problems they have in producing a piece of writing into consideration, the author of this study approaches senior high school students’ English writing with Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion theory as the theoretical framework. The aim of this study is to find out the status quo of the employment of cohesive devices in senior high school students’English writing. The problems that exist in the use of cohesive devices are probed into and the according coping strategies are also investigated. The participants are senior high school students in Yunyang Senior High School.100 English compositions accomplished in a mock examination are collected as data for this study. The frequencies of the use and misuse of various cohesive devices are calculated. And questionnaire and interview are conducted after the data have been collected and processed to get a better understanding of the problems that exist in the use of cohesive devices. The reasons for the improper uses and also the strategies for better application of cohesive devices are investigated. The results show that the most frequently used cohesive devices are reference, lexical cohesion and conjunction. Accordingly, the errors committed by the students mainly concern reference and lexical cohesion. Still another phenomenon is that the lexical items used by the students are always in the simplest form and lack variety. The study also finds that the factors that account for the current situation of students’ application of cohesive devices are as follows:lack of awareness of the cohesive devices; inter-lingual interference; inadequate language input; psychological factors; insufficient writing practice. Therefore, the author advocates some coping strategies targeted at these contributing factors such as enhancing students’ awareness of cohesive theory, increasing students’ language input, helping students to overcome inter-lingual interference and some psychological problems and more writing practices are also advised.