A Corpus-based Study Of Use Of Cohesive Devices In Argumentative Essays By Chinese College Students

Cohesion plays an important role in English writing,for it can reflect writers how to organize a logical text to express their ideas and convey comprehensive and complete discourse information to readers.Scholars both abroad and at home have made researches on cohesive devices from different perspectives,in allusion to how ESL students employ cohesive devices in writing,many research results have revealed that learners either overused or underused even misused cohesive devices.While,how English learners in foreign language environment utilize cohesive devices still remains further empirical study.With reference to argumentative essays by English native speakers,this study analyzed how Chinese college students utilize cohesive devices in argumentative essays to examine the following questions:1.What are the differences between Chinese college students and English native college students in cohesive devices types when applying personal reference,substitution,conjunction and lexical cohesion in argumentative essays?2.What are the collocation features in terms of the four cohesive devices?3.What are the reasons leading to the collocation features and differences?Halliday and Hason’s cohesive theory and Sinclair’s lexical item model are adopted as the theoretical framework,AntConc3.4.4 is employed to retrieve argumentative essays in TECCL and LOCNESS to collect data.SPSS for Windows 17.0 is used as statistical tool to do an inferential statistical analysis and independent t-test and Chi-square test.The following results have been drawn:1.With respect to English native college students,there are significant differences between Chinese college students and English native college students in terms of personal reference and lexical cohesion devices,and the differences in substitution and conjunction are not significant.2.With respect to English native college students,the collocations for the four cohesive devices in Chinese college students’ writing have the following features:collocations are not as rich as those in English native’s;collocation degree of the collocation words is not as strong as those in English native’s;and Chinese college students have a semantic preference while applying these words to state their opinions.Based on the above results,we hold the view that Chinese college students have certain awareness on cohesive devices,but their cognitive identification on cohesive function of cohesive devices is not strong enough,meanwhile,students writing level,inter-lingual difference of Chinese and English have impact on the features and differences as well.This study made up some shortcomings of the study on collocations of cohesive devices,which possesses theoretical significance.On the other hand,this study has practical value on the use of cohesive devices in Chinese EFL learners’ writing,as for teachers,teachers could make use of the above research results to show the using status of cohesive devices,and then guide students to practice and further enhance their awareness of the cohesive function.As for students,they could develop skills to employ cohesive devices more inflexible and various and further improve wring quality.