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

English writing is not only a focus but also an objective of English teaching.It is an essential way of language output.However,as an important ability of language output,senior high school students' writing ability is still weak in general.One of the weaknesses lies in the use of cohesive devices,which affects the quality of their writing.So this thesis is going to do a research in this field in order to find out the specific problems with cohesion in their writing and the teachers' teaching.As a school-based research,this thesis takes Weinan Gaoxin Middle School as an example.Based on the taxonomy of cohesive devices by Halliday and Hasan,148 students are surveyed to learn students' awareness and the teaching of cohesive devices,and students' knowledge of cohesive devices.The data is collected and analyzed by SPSS 20.0.At the same time,the author analyzes and studys the using of cohesive devices in senior high school English writing through the 50 compositions.In addition,the author interviews six students to deepen the investigation.Through the analyses and discussions above,the thesis finally draws a conclusion that in general only a limited number of students have strong sense and a good knowledge of cohesion who can use the cohesive devices efficiently in their writing.About the various types of cohesive devices,the most commonly used one is reference,followed by lexical cohesion and conjunction.Substitution and ellipsis are rarely used.Apart from the limited cohesive devices used,the relevant errors appear.Among all the reference errors,personal reference errors make up the most,followed by demonstrative reference error and comparative reference error.In lexical cohesion errors,over use of repetition and misuse of collocation are most common.There are three kinds of errors in conjunction errors,namely,the loss and misuse of conjunctions,the simplicity and singleness of conjunctions as well.In view of the above issues,this study proposes that teachers are supposed to give more instructions and stress the importance of cohesive device in their daily teaching.In addition,they are suggested to also supposed to make some comparison between Chinese and English writing and encourage learners to use rich cohesive devices in their daily writing practice to raise the quality of their English writing.Besides,in their daily feedback on the student's writing,teachers should also emphasize cohesion.