A Study On The Use Of Lexical Cohesion In High School English Writing

Lexical cohesion, as "the dominant mode of creating texture", has drawn large numbers of researchers’ attentions. But their studies stay only on a superficial level by counting and summarizing the types of lexical cohesion instead of deeper analysis and explanation. Moreover, their research subjects are often college students and few studies are carried out on high school students. Thus it is meaningful to study the lexical cohesive devices in high school English writing and analyze it in a far profounder way.Based on Halliday, Hasan and Hoey’s classifications of lexical cohesion, this thesis divides lexical cohesion into seven types:simple repetition, complex repetition, synonym, antonym, hyponym, general words and collocation, and aims to answer the following questions:1. How frequently are the seven types of lexical cohesion used in students’ writing?2. What’s the relationship between each type of lexical cohesion and students’ English writing quality?3. Are there any lexical cohesive errors? If so, what are the causes of these errors?The subjects are 80 argumentative compositions, written by 80 Grade Two students from a high school in Nanjing. After scoring,60 compositions are chosen as samples, which are further divided into two groups by half:high-scored group (HG) and low-scored group (LG). Then the study is conducted to find out the actual use of lexical cohesion in students’ compositions by combining the quantitative and qualitative methods. SPSS 18.0 is used to get a general idea of the frequency of the seven types of lexical cohesion; independent samples test are used to find out whether the two groups have significant differences in using lexical cohesive devices; Pearson correlation analysis is used to find the relationship between lexical cohesion and the writing quality; sample analysis is employed to analyze the typical lexical cohesive errors; and an investigation is adopted to dig out the reasons underlying these errors.Eventually major conclusions have been drawn:Firstly, in terms of frequency, high school students tend to use large quantities of simple repetition; students in high-scored group use more lexical cohesion than those in low-scored group; students in low-scored group tend to use more general words than those in high-scored group. Besides, there are significant differences between the two groups regarding complex repetition, synonym, antonym and hyponym; while there are no significant differences between the two groups in terms of simple repetition, general words and collocation.Secondly, regarding the relationship between each type of lexical cohesion and the writing quality, it is shown that synonym has the closest correlation with the writing quality, and next are complex repetition and antonym. Simple repetition, hyponym, general words and collocation are not related to the quality of writing.Lastly, the rate of errors of collocation is the highest among all the students; the rate of errors of complex repetition is bigger than that of simple repetition in both groups; and students in low-scored group tend to make more mistakes than students in high-scored group in using synonyms. The typical lexical cohesive errors are over-generalization and interlingual errors. The causes of these errors are mainly: students’ anxiety and low-confidence, interlingual transfer, small vocabulary, limited knowledge of lexical cohesion, and the teachers’ unclear instruction of cohesion and coherence.