A Comparative Study On Lexical Cohesion In Argumentative Compositions By English Major Students At Different Proficiency Levels

Writing is one of the basic skills for foreign language learners.For English major students,how to write a cohesive and coherent argumentative writing is a relatively important issue.The cohesion theory provides some references to the language learners.It was firstly put forward by Halliday and Hasan(1967).Then Hoey(1991)made a more detailed and comprehensive study on lexical cohesion and he pointed out that lexical cohesion is the most important device among all the devices.In the past years,many studies have been carried out concentrating on lexical cohesion in all kinds of texts.Some of them focused on the lexical cohesion in learner's writings based on Halliday and Hasan's theory of lexical cohesion.After Hoey proposed the new theory of lexical cohesion,his theory was gradually applied into different studies.Studies have been carried out on different types of discourses such as legal discourse,English abstract of theses(Janina Buitkiene,2005;Jin Kai,2003).However,there have been only a few studies focusing on English major students' argumentative writings on the basis of Hoey's lexical repetition theory.Therefore,based on Hoey's lexical cohesion theory,this study aims to present a general picture of the use of lexical cohesion by freshmen and senior students who major in English and find out their difference in using lexical cohesive device by adopting the quantitative method.The study tries to answer the following questions:(1)Is there any difference in using the eight types of lexical repetitions between the argumentative compositions by English major students at different proficiency levels? Specifically,which are the preferred types in the writings by freshmen and senior students;Is there any difference in their using each type of repetitions,namely,simple lexical repetition,complex lexical repetition,simple paraphrase,complex paraphrase,superordinate and hyponymic repetition,co-reference,substitution,ellipsis?(2)Is there any difference in using bonds between their compositions?(3)Is there any difference in their using central sentences and marginal sentences? To answer these questions,one hundred argumentative writings of which fifty writings were written by freshmen and fifty writings were written by senior students were analyzed concerning the repetition types,bonds and central sentences and marginal sentences.The findings are as follows: As to lexical repetition,their similarity was that they both tended to use simple lexical repetition and complex lexical repetition and co-reference in their writings;their difference lied in the use of simple lexical repetition,complex lexical repetition,simple paraphrase,complex paraphrase,co-reference and substitution.Senior students used less simple lexical repetition and co-reference than freshmen but used more complex lexical repetition,simple paraphrase,complex paraphrase and substitution.In the use of bonds,the result shows that freshmen and senior students were not significantly different.In addition,they were not significantly different in using central sentences but different in using marginal sentences.Senior students employed less marginal sentences than freshmen.And some pedagogical implications were given.