| Most Chinese college students have learned English for at least ten years before they enter college,but many still find it hard to write an authentic English composition.The problem in cohesion may be one of the reasons.Much research has been done on the cohesion in various text types and Chinese students' English writing has been studied from the beginning of writing a composition,to students' perception of writing and to the evaluation of students' final pieces of works.However,college students' writing,especially in contrast with native speakers' writing in terms of its cohesion,is still in need of more studies.Based on the cohesive devices: reference,substitution,ellipsis,conjunction and lexical cohesion,proposed by Halliday and Hasan in Cohesion in English(1976),we examined 50 English compositions written by Chinese college students and 50 English compositions written by native English speakers in this study to see how they had used cohesive devices in their writing and compared the results to see if there were any similarities and differences between the two.The study found that Chinese college students and native English speakers used a similar number of cohesive ties in their 50 English compositions.However,Chinese students used more reference and conjunctions but much less lexical cohesion than native speakers.Besides,Chinese students used less reference and fewer lexical cohesive devices in the introduction part of the composition.More reference and lexical cohesive devices but fewer conjunctions were seen in the body part of their compositions than in native speakers' compositions.According to the findings,some explanations were given.For instance,the discrepancies may come from the difference between the Chinese and the English language.Then,some suggestions were provided like teachers ought to instruct students to use cohesive devices properly.It is hoped that this study can contribute to research on cohesion and English composition writing. |
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