A Corpus-based Study On The Use And Development Of Cohesive Devices And Their Relations With The Quality Of Chinese English Majors' Argumentative Writing

English writing is considered the most important and sophisticated skill which should be fully mastered by all English language learners.Many factors affect the quality of English writing.Among them,the cohesion of discourse has been an important topic in writing research.Recently,most studies at home and abroad have focused on local and text cohesion in English writing,while only a few studies have explored global cohesion features.To address the gaps of previous studies,the overarching purpose of this study is to investigate the use and development trend of local,global,and text cohesion features in Chinese English majors' argumentative writing and to examine the influence of these cohesion types on the judgment of English writing quality.The present study is a corpus-based study.The Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners(WECCL 2.0)was adopted as the main corpus.Besides,two computational linguistic analysis tools: Coh-Metrix & TAACO(TAACO: Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Cohesion)were used in this study.In order to explore the use and development of cohesive devices(also known as cohesive ties)and their relations to the judgment of essay quality in Chinese English majors' argumentative writing,three specific questions are formulated as follows:(1)What is the overall use of cohesive devices in Chinese English majors' argumentative writing in WECCL?(2)What is the developmental trend of cohesive devices in Chinese English majors' argumentative writing across grade levels in WECCL?(3)What's the relationship between cohesive devices and English writing quality ?The main research findings of the study could be concluded as follows: Firstly,Chinese English majors use a variety of cohesive devices.Among them,connectives and lexical overlaps are more frequently used in English writing.Secondly,a tiny minority of cohesive devices showed growth across four grade levels.The strongest growth,as indicated by the effect size,was an increase in stem overlap between adjacent sentences.And the results of the Pearson correlations indicated that,of the thirty cohesion indices involved,most of them showed no significant differences fromgrade 1 to grade 4.Thirdly,with regard to the effect of cohesive devices on the judgment of English writing quality,the results displayed that fourteen cohesion indices have significant relationships with the writing scores.Moreover,among the fourteen cohesion indices,Latent Semantic Analysis(LSA)between all sentences is negatively related to the overall judgments of writing quality.This study enriches the research methods and perspectives in the field of discourse cohesion in English writing by means of a corpus-based empirical study.Additionally,the research findings of the present study have important implications on second language acquisition,English writing development,English writing teaching and also automatic scoring system of English essays.