A Survey Of Lexical Cohesive Devices In Senior High School Students' English Writing

As we all know,writing teaching is a difficulty point in high school English teaching.As an important means of information output,writing is often used to measure learners' English comprehensive ability.English writing occupies an important proportion in the college entrance examination and the requirement for students' writing ability is also increasing year by year.However,every year the scores on the college entrance examination are not satisfactory.Therefore,English writing has received extensive attention,especially the study of cohesion.Because coherence is the basic attribute of the text,and cohesion is the basis of coherence.So cohesion is an important condition for the formation of a sentence.Lexical cohesion plays an irreplaceable role in the coherence of the text.Many scholars have studied lexical cohesion but most of objects are college students and samples are style genre.Therefore,it is of profound significance to analyze the use of lexical cohesion in different genres of high school students.This article combines the classification of lexical cohesion between Halliday,Hasan and Hoey.The lexical cohesive devices are divided into six categories: Simple repetition,complex repetition,synonyms,antonyms,hyponym,and general words are designed to answer the following questions:1.What is the difference in the use of lexical cohesion in the composition of different genres?2.What's the correlation between lexical cohesion and composition quality in different genre compositions?3.What are the mistakes in the use of lexical cohesive devices? What is the cause of these mistakes?This study takes grade three of senior high school students in Shizhu Middle School as the research object.A sample of 80 effective compositions was selected from their two exams in the last semester of the senior high school.The sample was divided into high and low groups.The genres of the compositions are practical writing and argumentation respectively.This study uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to explore the use of lexical cohesive devices in the writing of different genres of high school students.In this study,EXCEL is used to describe the overall situation of the use of lexical cohesion in compositions.Independent sample T test is used to analyze the differences in the use of lexical cohesion in different compositions of different genres.Pearson correlation is used to analyze the relationship between lexical cohesive devices and composition quality in different compositions.Text analysis and interview are used to analyze the causes of errors.Major conclusions have been drawn: Firstly,in the distribution of lexical cohesion,both of the two genres use a large number of lexical cohesive devices and the number of high score group is higher than the low score group.There is no obvious difference between the two genres in the composition of the essay in the use of simple repetition and general words.The high score groups in the use of complex repetition,synonyms and antonyms are more than low score groups.Secondly,the relationship between the lexical cohesion and the quality of the composition of the two genre compositions.The complex repetition,synonym and antonym in the composition are closely related to the quality of the composition,only the significance of the two genres is different.While the use of simple repetition and general words shows no significant correlation with the quality of the composition.Thirdly,the error rate of the lexical cohesion in the two genres is very high,but all the low score groups are higher than the high groups,especially in the use of complex repetition,synonym and antonym.The main causes of the errors are: negative transfer of mother tongue,limited vocabulary,learning words out of context,students' lack of attention to lexical cohesion and teacher's unclear instruction of lexical cohesion.