Study On The Discourse Errors Of Senior High School Students English Compositions

Writing plays a significant role among five basic English skills—listening,speaking,reading,writing and translating.However,the current situation of English writing in senior high school is not that ideal.Students have not grasped the basic skills of discourse cohesion.How to write meaningful and grammatical sentences in English writing remains difficult for Chinese English learners.In addition,it has become one of the important subjects for English teaching to improve the present situation.Based on the cohesion and coherence theory of Halliday and Hasan,this study aims to explore the cohesion and coherence errors in students' English compositions and probes into the possible causes.According to which,some implications are given to enhance students' writing level.This study picks 178 English compositions as the study materials,among which there are 46 narrations,41 expositions,43 argumentations and 48 practical writings.From these materials,120 valid compositions(30 compositions from each genre)are chosen,except for the shortage of words,incomplete sentences and improper content for the topic.These compositions are written by students in grade two,He Dong No.One Middle school,Yuncheng,Shanxi province.The theoretical framework of the study is the cohesion and coherence theory of Halliday and Hasan.According to Huang Guowen's taxonomy of cohesion and coherence,the error analysis is carried out from the aspects of grammatical devices,lexical cohesion,logical connectors and macro coherence.Through statistical analysis,it is found that:Students make some cohesion errors in grammatical device,lexical cohesion,logical connector and macro coherence.Among grammatical device errors,the reference errors take up relatively high frequency.However,substitution and ellipsis errors are rare.Among lexical cohesion errors,the error of repetition of the synonyms is relatively more than the repetition of the original words error.Among logical connector errors,the lack of logical connector errors is relatively more than the misuse of connectors.Among macro coherence errors,the errors in body part are the most frequent while that in the beginning and the conclusion part are relatively less.At the same time,the lexical cohesion errors are the most frequent among the four different writing styles.The grammatical device errors are relatively more in narration than that in other three styles.The macro coherence errors are relatively the most frequent in exposition than that in other three styles.The lexical cohesion errors are the most frequent in argumentation than that in other three styles.Among the four different styles,the logical connector errors occupy high in practical writing.Therefore,the thesis aims to give some implications for English writing teaching and the future study.