Investigating Senior High School Students’ Use Of Cohesive Devices In English Writing

Writing skills are critical for evaluating students’ English proficiency.Writing can reflect the students’ comprehensive language use as a process of a recreating style.However,it is not easy for senior high school students to write a composition with correct grammar and coherent sentences.Hence,this study selected Liantang No.1Middle School as the research site.The cohesion theory of Halliday and Hasan(1976)is the primary theoretical foundation of this study.Cohesive devices are classified into five categories,namely,reference,substitution,ellipsis,conjunction and lexical cohesion.writing samples from three grades(40 compositions from each grade)were collected to explore the research questions:(1)What are the distribution of cohesive devices in senior high school students’ compositions ?(2)What cohesive-related errors are committed in senior high school students’ compositions,and what are the reasons ?(3)How are the use of cohesive devices related to students’ writing quality ? The author collected the research data and used SPSS(16.0)to analyze them.At the same time,to better answer the research questions,the author conducted interviews with some teachers and students.The research methodology adopted in this study was a mixed one,with qualitative,quantitative and interviews methods to answer the research questions: 1)Descriptive statistics was employed to show the distribution of cohesive devices in students’ writings;2)Descriptive statistics and interviews were used in combination to describe the errors of cohesive devices;3)One-way ANOVA was used to analyze whether there were significant differences or similarities in using cohesive devices among senior one,senior two and senior three;4)Pearson correlation analysis was performed to judge the relationship between cohesive devices and writing quality;The thesis concluded that most of students did not have a good sense of using cohesive devices and could not use cohesive devices well when they write compositions.For various types of cohesive devices,the most frequently used was reference,followed by conjunction and lexical cohesion.However,substitution and ellipsis were rarely utilized.Secondly,students make different cohesive-related errors in the five cohesive devices,among which the errors of reference and lexical cohesion were the most.The school did not offer specific writing courses,so English teachers also did not realize the importance of writing,let alone teaching cohesive devices.Thirdly,there were few differences between substitution and ellipsis from senior one to senior three;senior three had made great progress in using lexical cohesion compared to senior one;the results showed a steady increase in using conjunction from senior one to senior three;compared with senior three,senior one used more substitution.Cohesive devices were positively correlated with writing quality.Finally,the neglect of writing instruction,inadequate basic knowledge,low awareness of cohesive devices and negative influence of L1 were the main reasons for cohesive devices’ errors.