Lexical Cohesion In TEM-4 Writings By English Major Students

As a major type of language output of EFL/ESL learners,writing is included into the test papers of TEM-4 which serves the purpose of assessing Chinese undergraduate English major students' English proficiency.It is natural that the assessment scale for the writing tasks of TEM-4 prescribes the use of cohesive devices as a viable criterion of grading as lexical cohesive devices play an important role in building the texture of discourse.It is been pointed out that lexical cohesion occupies 42 percent of all the cohesive ties,and at the same time,the words can be linked to more than one word,from which it can be seen that lexicon provides a kind of cohesion devices which often form multiple relationships in the discourse.Thus,studying lexical cohesion plays a vital role in investigating cohesion in discourse.Sine 1980 s,the question concerning the degree to which lexical cohesion decides the writing quality has been discussed and studied by foreign scholars,but there still is not a clear answer to this question.Speaking of domestic researchers,few of them conducted quantitative analyses of lexical cohesion or rarely made investigations into the characteristics and essence of lexical cohesion from a macro perspective,which hindered them from providing a solid basis for the use of lexical cohesion as a clear indicator of the quality of English writings by Chinese students.This thesis is primarily devoted to the discussion of the relevance of lexical cohesion to the overall quality of English writings of Chinese college students and investigates the viability of lexical cohesion as a construct distinct from others by comparing the evidence of lexical cohesion in the writings with that of other types of cohesion and language errors.In this study,40 samples of TEM-4 writings were selected from Corpus for English Majors(CEM).The study identified and described the writers' use of simple competition,complex repetition,synonyms,antonyms,hyponymyand collocation in English major students' TEM-4 compositions,using a method of classification of lexical cohesion that incorporates the classification proposed by Halliday and Hasan in 1976 and 1984,and another classification given by Hoey in 1991 and suggestions made by still several other scholars.This study then acquired a description of the presence of lexical cohesion in the writings and continued to apply quantitative analyses to the data generated in order to make discoveries about the following three topics:1.Whether there is correlation between lexical cohesion and conjunction,ellipsis,reference or substitution or not.2.Whether there is correlation between lexical cohesion and the errors made in the students' compositions.3.Whether there is correlation between lexical cohesion and writing quality.The results show that except conjunction,ellipsis,reference and substitution have no correlation with lexical cohesion.There is no correlation between lexical cohesion and the errors in the selected samples.Complex repetition,synonyms,antonyms and collocation are significantly related to the writing quality.Based on the results,this paper argues that teachers should consciously develop effective pedagogical measures that emphasize the teaching of complex repetition,synonyms,antonyms and collocation to improve students' writing proficiency.