| Of the four language skills, writing is usually considered to be the most difficult and the last acquired. Therefore, it has been an issue that attracts the attention of many foreign and Chinese English teachers. For Chinese learners of English, the obvious difficulty in writing is to produce sentences grammatically correct and meaningful, and it is more difficult to make all the sentences logically connected. How does a succession of sentences hang together to covey one complete message? What makes a text coherent? In the field of linguistic study, however, this has been relatively neglected for a long time. Halliday and Hasan's book Cohesion in English (1976) illustrates that cohesion is the foundation of coherence, which is the most important prerequisite for the text. Through investigating the use of cohesive devices in compositions by students, it is possible for teachers to understand students' problem in producing a coherent discourse and they can then instruct students to improve the quality of their writing. Thus, it has potential implications for language learning and teaching.An investigation was carried out to compare the use of cohesion between the good and poor compositions (40 for each group) chosen from 380 non-English major graduate students. It is hypothesized that the frequency of both grammatical and lexical cohesion is much higher in good compositions than that in poor ones. The purpose is to show that the use of cohesive devices contributes most to good writing.This research is to answer two questions:1. How frequently are cohesive devices used in the sample compositions?2. What is the relationship between the frequency of the cohesive devices and the quality of a composition?In the study, cohesive devices used in each sample composition were first identified according to Halliday and Hasan's taxonomy of cohesive devices. For statistic convenience, only those typical ones were compared and discussed. They are the total number of cohesive devices in each category. That is, the total number of reference: including personal, demonstrative and comparative reference; substitute and ellipsis; conjunction: including some subcategories like additive and adversative conjunction; and lexical cohesion including reiteration and collocation. The cohesive devices used in the two groups of compositions were treated respectively and were then computed and processed by the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS).By using the "Descriptive Statistics" of the SPSS, descriptive data were obtained. It was found that among cohesive devices, the number and types of conjunctions, lexical cohesion, substitute and ellipsis contribute most to the good writing, followed by some forms of the reference. To be specific, cohesive devices like the total number and types of conjunction, synonymy and collocation, and ellipsis have the highest significance to high scores. Comparison of mean and use of these cohesive devices between the two groups shows that highly-rated group adopted a higher number and more types of cohesive devices while the lowly-rated group adopted fewer cohesive devices either in number or in types. It reveals that the use of cohesive devices contributes to the quality of the writing and can be taught. As a result, it is necessary to pay close attention to them so as to strengthen the awareness of both teachers and learners in using the cohesive devices. And focusing on the combination of textual cohesion and textual teaching will be significant to the teaching of English writing. |
