A Study On The Application Of Textual Cohesion Devices In Senior High School Students' English Writing

English writing is an important language output skill,Chinese students are short of systemic writing guidance and regular writing training,which lead to weak consciousness in textual cohesion,looseness of structure,and poor cohesion in sentences and paragraphs.Based on textual cohesion of Halliday and Hasan(1976),beginning with lexical cohesion,substitution,ellipsis,reference,and conjunction,the author did a study on two questions: firstly,what are the main textual cohesion devices used in Senior High School English writing? Secondly,which textual cohesion devices are more relevant to the quality of senior school students' English writing? The author extracted monthly examination writing of 242 students' English writing as the research subject in senior three,did data acquisition and analysis on students' writing texts,analyzed their writing texts,and marked and coded each textual cohesion device.EXCEL software was used to do data sorting and analysis.The author solved the above-mentioned two problems to draw a conclusion that the common textual cohesion device used by senior high school students in English writing includes lexical cohesion,reference,conjunction,substitution,ellipsis respectively.Textual cohesion devices ellipsis and substitution are seldom used.Meanwhile,according to students' performance ranking,high-level and low-level writing were obtained SPSS19.0 software was used to do data analysis.The Independent-Samples Test was applied.The significant difference between textual cohesion and students' English performance was analyzed.The mean number of using cohesion devices used by the high-mark group was greatly higher than the low-mark group(P<0.05),indicating that there was a significant difference in the number of cohesion devices.Also,in “high-level”and “low-level” writing,the total cohesive number,lexical cohesion device and reference cohesion devices had the significant difference.Lexical cohesion had the greatest contribution to “high-level” writing,followed by reference and conjunction.The correlation analysis showed that utilization of textual cohesion had the significant correlation with students' English writing.The quality of English wiring had the significantly positive low-level correlation with substitution,had the significantlypositive middle-grade correlation with conjunction and reference,and had the significantly positive high-grade correlation with lexical cohesion.Therefore,students' consciousness of textual cohesion devices should be cultivated in English writing teaching.Meanwhile,textual cohesion devices should be trained to improve English writing quality.