A Study Of The Application Of Cohesive Devices In English Writing In Senior High School

Although Chinese senior high school students have learned English for more than ten years and memorized many words, it is not easy for most of them to write compositions which are properly cohesive and semantically coherent. Maybe students’ incompetence in English writing owes to students’ limited knowledge of cohesive devices and lack of consciousness of cohesion. Thus, the author attempts to apply cohesive devices in English writing in senior high school, which aims at improving English writing.The subjects of the study were the Senior Grade 1 students in one senior high school in Shenyang. Class Three was taken as the experimental class while Class Four was considered as the control class. The author introduced cohesive devices to the experimental class while the traditional writing teaching approach was applied in the control class. The first monthly exam and the final exam of the first semester were respectively taken as the pretest and posttest. Then the author delivered a questionnaire in the experimental class during the pretest and posttest. After analyzing students’ pretest compositions of the experimental class, the author found that the students made many cohesive errors. In the students’ compositions, the commonly used cohesive devices were reference, conjunction and lexical cohesion. The number of ellipsis and substitution that students used was not very large. Through a detailed study of the compositions and the questionnaire of the experimental class in both tests, the author found that the students’ consciousness and knowledge of cohesion increased a lot after a three-month writing course. The students applied more cohesive devices and made less cohesive mistakes in the posttest compositions. By comparing the scores of the experimental class with the scores of the control class in the posttest, the author concluded that the writing performance of the students in the experimental class got significantly improved. The results of the interview also indicated that applying cohesive devices in English writing in senior high school was effective.Finally, the author gives some suggestions for English teachers in senior high school, which may contribute to the improvement of English writing.