A Study Of The Use Of Cohesive Devices In English Writing By Senior High School Students

For English learners in senior high school,writing skills are important for evaluation of the English proficiency.Writing,as a process of re-creation of language,can reflect the English competence of students.Whether students can use cohesive devices properly is one of the key factors to evaluate their English writing level.The purpose of this paper is to study the employment of cohesive devices in English compositions by senior high school students,and to explore the general ability related to wording and phrasing,and discourse construction of high school students.This paper also aims to improve English teaching of high school and the quality of English writing.The objects of the study are the second-year students in Yantai No.1 Middle School.In this study,60 papers of the final examination in the year 2015 were randomly selected as the samples for analysis,and the combinational method of both qualitative and quantitative analysis is used.This study is based on Halliday & Hasan's theory of cohesion and their taxonomy of cohesive devices,and the error analysis is also applied to textual level in this thesis.The three research questions are listed as follows: 1)What is the distribution of various types of cohesive devices in English compositions of high school students? 2)What cohesive errors are committed in the English compositions of high school students? 3)What are the causes leading to the improper use of cohesive devices in high school students' compositions?The following conclusions are drawn in this study.Firstly,the three types of cohesive devices frequently used in high school students' English compositions are lexical cohesion,reference and conjunction,and the other two cohesive devices of ellipsis and substitution are rarely used in their writing.Secondly,there are a lot of cohesive errors in high school students' English writing,including discontinuous use of personal pronouns,misuse and overuse of some certain cohesive ties,monotonous use of comparative reference,overuse of repetitions and misuse of collocations.Thirdly,there are a variety of causes contributing to the cohesive errors in the compositions written by senior high school students,such as negative transfer of mother tongue,inadequate knowledge of vocabulary and inadequate awareness of cohesion and coherence.This study suggests that in high school English writing teaching,teachers should consciously cultivate students' awareness of cohesion,combine reading and writing to enlarge students' vocabulary,and encourage students to do some exercises of translation between Chinese and English,to promote quality of English writings of students.