Lexical Density, Lexical Cohesion And Composition Quality

Writing is one of the most important aspects in FL/SL teaching and learning. This thesis, as an empirical study, attempts to explore the interrelationship between composition quality, lexical density and lexical cohesion. Lexical density and lexical cohesion are the two concepts concerning vocabulary. Nowadays language research has seen a shift in focus from individual components to the text as a whole, but the bringing of a text dimension into language teaching does not by any means imply an abandonment of teaching vocabulary.Unlike the previous related researches, the study first focuses on Halliday's(1985) rather than Ure's(1971) lexical density. Second, it takes as a whole the theoretical framework of Halliday (1976) and that of Hoey (1991) in the classification of lexical cohesion. In this way, this study may make a more thorough and objective exploration of the interrelationship between composition quality, lexical density and lexical cohesion to make some possible contribution to the teaching and learning of English writing.This study takes 64 argumentative compositions collected from the second-year English majors in a certain Chinese university as the samples and analyzes their lexical densities and the features on the use of lexical cohesive devices as well. The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One, as an introduction, ushers in the background, the previous research, the purposes and significance, the analytical methods as well as the overall structure. Chapter Two deals with the theoretical foundation and the basic concepts of lexical density and lexical cohesion as well as its taxonomy. Chapter Three is about the methodology and the process of data collection. Chapter Four focuses on the results and discussion. Chapter Five gives the conclusion including the pedagogical implications, limitations and suggestions for further research.In the whole research process, four steps were adopted. First, a pilot study was carried out to ensure the feasibility of the main study and anticipate occurrences of possible problems. Then, according to the result of the pilot...