A Study Of Cohesion Errors In English Writings Of Senior High School Students

Cultivation of students’ English writing ability occupies an important place in English language teaching. Due to the the improper use of cohesive devices, quite a number of English compositions written by Chinese high school students show a lack of orderly arrangement, logic or coherence. Their language expressions and way of thinking are obviously influenced by the negative transfer of Chinese. Therefore, the quality of their writing is barely satisfactory. To solve these problems, this study, based on cohesion theory proposed by Halliday, uses the students’ compositions as samples to make a comparative analysis of cohesive devices in their Chinese and English writings. It is found that students often make such mistakes as confusing references, too much reiteration, lack of substitution and ellipsis, misuse of conjunctions, and wrong collocations.This research also finds that there are three factors leading to cohesion mistakes. Firstly, language learners are influenced by negative transfer of their mother tongue. Secondly, language learners lack interest and confidence in writing. Thirdly, language learners didn’t lay a solid foundation for language learning,In order to find some problem-targeted strategies for teaching writing. The author conducted experimental teaching for two months. A comparison of the results of the pre-test and the post-test proves that some teaching strategies promote students’ writing abilities to a certain extent. According to the result of experiment, some feasible teaching and training methods are presented, which include lexicon and syntax training, cohesion and coherence exercises as well as some drills for cultivation of writing and thinking abilities. All these will finally lead to comprehensive writing exercises, which helps students gradually master the skills of language using and thinking.