A Corpus-based Study Of Textual Cohesion Features Of Chinese Non-English Majors’ Argumentative Writing

Among the five language skills of listening,speaking,reading,writing and translating,writing is generally considered the most important and the most difficult to master,which can most intuitively reflect students’ comprehensive language ability.Because most Chinese non-English majors have limited time to study English in-depth during the university period,their English writing suffers greatly from issues like poor logical relationships,uncertain semantic meaning,and so on.These issues are primarily caused by the incorrect use of cohesive devices.Since the measurement indicators of textual cohesion features of Chinese non-English major students’ argumentative essays provided by the tool TAACO do not have clear judgment criteria,the author built a native speaker corpus as a reference.This research explicitly explores the textual cohesion features of Chinese non-English majors’ argumentative writing by using computational text analysis tool TAACO from three aspects: local cohesion,global cohesion,and text cohesion,to provide some directions for improvement in the writing teaching of Chinese non-English majors.This study answers the following two questions:(1)What are the textual cohesion devices generally used in Chinese non-English majors’ argumentative writing?(2)What are the differences between the use of cohesion devices in high-score writings and low-score writings? Is there any relationship between the use of cohesive devices and writing scores?The major findings of this research are as follows:(1)Chinese non-English majors use a variety of cohesive devices in their English writing to make it coherent.Compared with native speakers,they prefer to employ specific types of cohesive devices(e.g.,connectives and synonym overlaps between paragraphs),and their sentences contain less contextual information than that of native speakers.In addition,the lexical richness of Chinese students’ compositions is lower than that of native speakers.(2)Chinese non-English majors’ high-scoring and low-scoring writings have significant differences in six cohesive indicators.The local cohesion index and text cohesion index of high-scoring essays are higher than that of low-scoring essays,while the text cohesion index is lower than that of low-scoring essays.Therefore,the highscoring essays of Chinese non-English majors are more cohesive and coherent.(3)the results of Pearson correlation analysis show that ten cohesive indicators show a significant correlation with the composition score.The connectives in local cohesion and the TTR indicator in text cohesion significantly correlate with the composition score.This study enriches the research methods and perspectives in textual cohesion in English writing through a corpus-based empirical study.Furthermore,the research findings have important implications for the development of second-language acquisition,the improvement of English writing education,and update of the automatic grading system for English essays.