A Study On The Use Of Cohesive Devices In Senior High School Students' English Expository Writing

Writing is a beneficial way for people to exchange information and express ideas and feelings.However,writing has also been considered as the most difficult and complex part for Chinese students,since it calls for comprehensive applications of knowledge and skills,thus many problems existing in students' actual English writing,such as semantic inconsistencies,inappropriate use of words and sentences,no logical structure or outstanding theme,especially the discontinuity of coherence.In order to probe the ways of enhancing coherence of students' English writing,relevant theories have been introduced and studied.Cohesion theory is one of them which attract the most attention.Cohesion is a semantic concept about the relation of meaning in a text,which is beneficial for forming texts.Henceforth,a large number of researches from the perspective of cohesion have been carried out to analyze discourses,especially students' English writing,which have proved that the quality of English writing has a close relation to the appropriate use of cohesive devices.This present study focuses on investigating the use of cohesive devices in senior high school students' English expository writing,and tends to find out:(1)the characteristics of the employment of cohesive devices in senior high students' English expository writing;(2)the differences between high-level group and low-level group in relation to the use of cohesive devices;(3)the relationship between the English writing quality and the use of cohesive devices.The participants were senior three students from a senior high school in Shangrao,Jiangxi province;and 202 English expository compositions written by the students in an English mock entrance examination to college were collected for analysis.According to the writing scoring criteria of NMET,all the 202 compositions were marked and divided into high-level group and low-level group.And then,based on taxonomy of cohesive devices introduced by Halliday and Hasan,all the compositions were tagged and counted by hand.At last,all the data were input into the computer and SPSS17.0 was used to carry out descriptive statistics,independent sample t-test and correlation analysis.The major findings can be well concluded as follows: students in senior high school use lexical cohesion most frequently in their English expository writing,followed by conjunction and reference.There are statistically significant differences between the high-level group and low-level one;and the students from high-level group use more diversified cohesive ties than those from low-level group.And there is statistically significant positive relationship between the use of cohesive devices and the students' English expository writing quality.Based on the research findings,some pedagogical implications for both teachers and students are put forward.In English writing teaching,the attention should be shifted from grammar to the coherence of the whole text and more instructions about how to use cohesive devices in English writing should be offered.For students,they should expand their language input of cohesive devices,and make more practice about accurate and proper use of cohesive devices in their English writing.At the same time,some limitations of the study and suggestions to further researches are pointed out.