A Study Of Cohesive Errors In College English Writing Of Non-english Majors

Writing is an important skill in English learning.There are lots of factors influencing the quality of English writing.Cohesive devices play an important role in this aspect.According to College English Curriculum Requirements issued by Ministry of Education,in college English writing,one requirement is “coherent in discourse”,that is,the writing should be logical,organized and coherent.Coherence is regarded as a scoring criterion in many exams at home and abroad,such as CET4 and CET6,TOFEL,IELTS.Many researchers at home and abroad have conducted lots of studies about the cohesive device usage in writing.The results manifest that there are still some problems in the use of cohesive devices in students' writing.For example,many students can't use cohesive devices correctly in writing,which makes the writing content ambiguous.This study is based on Cohesion Theory and Error Analysis Theory,which probes further into the frequency distribution of cohesive errors in College English writing of non-English majors and the trend development of cohesive errors.Besides,the relationship between cohesive errors and writing quality is discussed and the reasons of cohesive errors are also analyzed in this study.It is hoped that this study will be helpful for College English writing.The feature of this study is that it belongs to a follow-up study which focuses on the cohesive errors in College English writing of Non-English majors.This study adopts quantitative and qualitative methods.The subjects involved are 154 students in China University of Petroleum(East China).They are from different majors and have different English proficiencies,but they have the same English course in the university.The author analyzes the collected 308 compositions.154 of the compositions were collected when the students were in their first year of college while the other 154 are collected one year later.And among each 154 compositions,64 of which are written by students with relatively higher English proficiency and 90 are from students with relatively lower English proficiency.Through the analysis of these compositions,the frequency distribution,trend development of cohesive errors and the relationship between cohesive errors and writing quality are to be found out.In addition,the main features of cohesive errors in writing are to be analyzed,and with the questionnaire,some reasons of cohesive errors are to be discussed.The results of this study show that the distribution of cohesive errors is uneven.The most cohesive errors students commit are reference,conjunction and lexical cohesion.After one year's study,some cohesive errors decrease obviously while some increase,like the errors of conjunction device,which should be paid more attention to.Besides,the cohesive errors are correlated negatively with the quality of English writing in general.And the errors of conjunction and lexical cohesion are most correlated with the quality of English writing,while there is no correlation between the errors of ellipsis and substitution and the quality of English writing.On the basis of the results of the study,some pedagogical implications for English writing teaching are put forward.