A Study On The Application Of Connectives In Senior High School Students' English Writing

In English writing,senior high school students often pay more attention to syntax and grammar,and ignore the integrity and coherence of articles.As a kind of explicit cohesive device,connectives can make certain contributions to the fluency and coherence of articles.With the guidance of Halliday and Hasan's Cohesion Theory,the present study aims to explore senior high school students' use of connectives in English writing.The quantitative and qualitative researches on connectives are employed,and analyses of different types of error connectives are conducted with specific writing examples.Combining the classifications of Halliday and Hasan(1976)and Quirk et al.(1985),the present study classifies all connectives into seven types(additive,contrastive,causal,conditional,enumerative,appositive and summative)and makes a quantitative research on them.Thus,the analyses on senior high school students' English writings can be more practical and representative.The research questions are as follows: 1.What are the general frequency and distribution of connectives used in senior high school students' compositions? 2.What is the relationship between the use of connectives and the score of writings? 3.What are the differences between the high-level group and the low-level group in terms of the use of connectives? 4.What problems do senior high school students have in using connectives? And what corresponding suggestions can be provided for English teaching?The research subjects of this study are 96 compositions,which are collected from two classes of senior grade one in Jiangsu Huai'an High School.And these compositions are written by students in one mid-term examination.The present study employs quantitative and qualitative research methods.The study draws the following results: To begin with,senior high school students basically use connectives in their writings,but seven categories of connectives are distributed unevenly.The most commonly used connectives are additive,contrastive and causal ones,followed byconditional and enumerative ones,and students rarely use summative and appositive ones.Due to students' limited knowledge on connectives,most of them are accustomed to using the simplest words(and,so,because,but,if,etc.).In addition,the results show that there is a positive correlation between the score of writing and the use of connectives in terms of number and type.The differences between the high-level group and the low-level group are mainly reflected in the use of contrastive,enumerative,appositive and summative connectives.Finally,it is found that students' misuse,underuse and overuse of connectives are chiefly due to the following reasons:the lack of systematical and comprehensive knowledge on connectives;the negative transfer of Chinese language;improper writing teaching methods;students' attitude towards writing and the way of teachers' correction on writings.In view of the above findings,the study puts forward the following suggestions for teachers: implementing English teaching at the discourse level;adjusting the writing teaching method;instructing relevant connective knowledge systematically and comprehensively;paying attention to differences between English language and Chinese language.