A Correlation Study Between Lexical Cohesion And English Writing Scores Of Senior High School Students

As everyone knows,writing is often adopted by people to evaluate learners' English comprehensive ability,which is a vital approach of information exchange.English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools(2017)put forward a new criterion to assess students' compositions,which makes English writing more important in college entrance examination,but in fact,the scores of students' writing in college entrance examination are not satisfactory every year.Therefore,writing teaching has become one of the most difficult points in English teaching in senior high school.Successful writing is to achieve better communication to express ones opinion and thoughts.As one of the important means of discourse construction,lexical cohesion becomes a hot topic in the field of applied linguistics and discourse analysis in recent years,which has attracted the attention of researchers.Many scholars have studied lexical cohesion but most of the previous research objects are college students.There are little discussion on middle school students.Moreover,the samples are single genre among the previous research,most of which are argumentative papers.Therefore,it is of profound significance to analyze the use of lexical cohesion in students' compositions of senior high school.This article combines the theory of lexical cohesion between Halliday,Hasan and Hoey.This study takes grade two of senior high schoolstudents in No.1 senior high school in Bayannur city as the research object.A sample of 300 effective compositions was selected randomly from their midterm exam in the last semester of the senior high school,which are used to built a self-built corpus to explore the use of lexical cohesion in the letter type of writing of senior high school students,which is going to answer three questions:1.What is the use of seven types of lexical cohesion in senior high school students' writings?2.Are there any differences about using each type of lexical cohesion between HG and LG.If there are,what are they?3.Are there any correlations between the use of each type of lexical cohesion and the scores of students' compositions of senior high school,and if so,what is the relation?In this study,Antconc3.5.8,SPSS25.0 and EXCEL are used to describe the overall situation of the use of lexical cohesion in students' compositions.The differences of the use of seven types of lexical cohesion between HG and LG are presented by the Independent sample T test.At last,the relationship between lexical cohesion and composition scores in different compositions is illustrated by Pearson correlation.Major conclusions have been drawn as flows:Firstly,in the use of lexical cohesion,grade two senior high school students tends to use a large number of lexical cohesion.The mostfrequent use is simple repetition.Then followed by collocation.And they lake of the using of antonym and hyponym during their writing time.Secondly,in terms of differences of the uses of lexical cohesion between HG and LG.There are significant differences in simple repetition,complex repetition,synonym,antonym and collocation between HG and LG,while there are no significant differences in hyponym and general words between the two groups.At last,in respect of the relationship between lexical cohesion and writing scores of compositions.The conclusion can be drawn as follows:1:there is a significant positive correlation between lexical cohesion and writing scores in complex repetition,synonym,antonym,collocation.2:collocation has the closest correlation(.425)with the writing scores,then followed by synonym(.247),complex repetition(.168)and antonym(.177).3: there are significant negative correlation between simple repetition(-.354)and writing scores.4: there are no correlation between hyponym and general words and the writing scores of students.