On Cohesive Devices Usage In Theses' English Abstracts From Agriculture Science Postgraduates

An abstract is the concentration of the theme and epitome of a study,which is indispensable for a paper.With increasing international academic exchange,English abstract becomes important for knowledge dissemination.Successful abstract should be explicit in meaning,clear in logic,concise in expression,correct in grammar,appropriate in cohesion,and coherent in texture.This requires writers should not only have good language competence,but also have strong logical thinking ability.Therefore,to write English abstract is not easy for Chinese students,especially for those non-English major postgraduates of agriculture science.Agriculture acts as the foundation of the national economy.The dissemination and promotion of agricultural knowledge and research fruit will be beneficial to deep opening and communication of agriculture.In China,107 universities and some scientific research institutions are qualified to confer master's degree of agriculture science.Therefore,students have various levels of English abstract writing.For most postgraduates of agriculture science,they are lack of systematic English abstract writing training.Furthermore,cohesion is often neglected in the process of writing,which is quite essential to develop logical thinking ability.Cohesion attracts many linguists' attention.Cohesion refers to a semantic concept that connects a text together and conveys the meaning of a text.When the interpretation of one element in the text is dependent on that of another,then the presupposing and the presupposed happen,a relation of cohesion is set up.Cohesion is divided into grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion.Grammatical cohesion is classified into four subtypes: reference,substitution,ellipsis and conjunction.Lexical cohesion is also classified into four subtypes: reiteration,synonymy and antonymy,hyponymy and meronymy,and collocation.We have seen fruitful achievements on cohesion theory and its application.And many studies on English abstract writing have also sprung up.However,there is little research on the cohesive features of master's thesis,particularly scarce of cohesion in English abstract of agriculture science.For this reason,this study adopts cohesion theory attempting to answer the three research questions: 1.How are cohesive devices applied in English abstract writings of masters' theses of agriculture science? 2.What causes the application of cohesive devices in the abstract writings? 3.How do teachers improve cohesive devices application in English abstracts writing for postgraduates of agriculture science?A case study is developed on the agricultural discipline of Yangtze University,which is a provincial key discipline and traditional predominant discipline of this university.Then,60 English abstract samples of the recent five-year publications are selected randomly from China Master's Theses Full-text Database.The data in this thesis also contain some interview data.Qualitative and quantitative methods are adopted to do the analysis.First,a corpus of 60 texts is built.Next,the classification and error of cohesive devices are coded.Then,the usage distribution and errors of cohesive devices are analyzed and collected.Personal reference is screened and collected by Antconc(Ver 3.4.3).After that,a pilot study is carried out to show the research procedure and method.All the 60 texts are analyzed in the same way as the pilot study.According to the text analyses,we try to find the causes of the application status from the perspectives of teaching and learning.The cause analysis is based on two interviews.One is designed for learners,and the other is for teachers.This study found that in English abstract writing of masters' theses in agriculture science: 1.The application of grammatical cohesion is more than lexical cohesion.For example,references and conjunctions are frequently used;but reiteration,collocation,synonymy and antonymy are used quite often,too.2.At the same time,grammatical cohesive errors are more than lexical ones.For example,demonstrative reference,additive conjunction and personal reference are frequently misused,while other cohesive devices are rarely misused.3.Verb substitution and clause ellipsis are never employed.We also found that some logical mistakes which show incoherence in the meaning,loosening in the structure,chaos in references and misusage in conjunctions.The causes that lead to the current application of cohesion usage distributionsand their errors come from the two interviews.The problem is mainly caused by the writers' insufficient knowledge and cognition of cohesion theory lead to poor or wrong use of cohesion.In addition,the two factors,shortage of cohesion writing training and negative language transferring,are also the main causes.Consequently,we proposed improving the application of cohesion for the postgraduates of agriculture science from three perspectives: grammatical cohesion,lexical cohesion,and textural cohesion.This thesis consists of six chapters.Chapter One introduces the research background,research purpose,significance and structure of the thesis.Chapter Two is the literature review on cohesion theory and abstract writing at home and abroad.Chapter Three introduces the theoretical background of cohesion and its classification.Chapter Four includes research questions,subjects,instruments,methods and procedures.It also shows how the data are collected and analyzed in a pilot study.Chapter Five is to reveal the results.What we found about cohesion in English abstract writings of master's theses of agriculture science,what causes this status,and how to improve future writing and teaching,will be answered in this chapter.Chapter Six is the conclusive part,in which the findings are revealed and the limitations and implications of the study are pointed out.