A Study Of The Developmental Patterns Of Lexical Cohesion In English Majors' Argumentative Writing

This study tries to present a general picture of the use of lexical cohesion in English majors'argumentative writing on the same topic. It aims to find out the developmental patterns of lexical cohesion in the writing across four grades and offer some suggestions to the teaching of English writing.More specifically, the research questions to be addressed in this study are as follows:1. What are the developmental patterns of lexical cohesion in English majors'argumentative writing in terms of simple repetition and complex repetition?2. What are the developmental patterns of lexical cohesion in English majors'argumentative writing in terms of synonymy and antonymy?3. What are the developmental patterns of lexical cohesion in English majors'argumentative writing in terms of hyponymy and meronymy?All the data analyzed in the present study come from Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (WECCL), one of the sub-corpora of Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (SWECCL). With 15 ones from each grade, 60 argumentative compositions in all are selected from this corpus. The data analysis involves three steps: tagging the compositions, calculating the frequency of lexical cohesive ties and comparing them with One-way ANOVA. The theoretical framework of this study was mainly based on the theory of lexical cohesion proposed by Halliday and Hasan.The major findings from this study are as follows:Firstly, the developmental pattern of lexical cohesion in English majors'argumentative writing in terms of simple repetition is that the frequency tends to decrease, while the developmental patterns in terms of complex repetition, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, and meronymy, are that the frequency tends to increase across four grades. This shows that English majors are getting more efficient in using some kinds of lexical cohesive devices to make the text coherent during the four years'English learning.Secondly, the frequency of lexical cohesive devices changes at a much higher speed during the periods from Grade 1 to Grade 2 and from Grade 2 to Grade 3 than during the period from Grade 3 to Grade 4. And opposite to the frequency of meronymy, the frequency of simple repetition, complex repetition, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy changes much faster during the period from Grade 1 to Grade 2 than during the period from Grade 2 to Grade 3. This tendency indicates that English majors'productive vocabulary improves more significantly during the earlier periods and the plateau phenomenon might also exist in the acquisition of lexical cohesion.Thirdly, of the six subcategories of lexical cohesion, simple repetition enjoys the highest percentage of occurrence in English majors'argumentative writing, followed by synonymy, complex repetition, hyponymy, antonymy and meronymy. This result implies that simple repetition is also the first choice for English majors to make the text cohesive and coherent. At the same time, it reflects that their productive vocabulary in writing lacks variety.These results offer some implications for the teaching of English writing for EFL students, especially English majors in China.First of all, explicit instructions in using lexical cohesive devices could be provided by the writing teachers in class instead of accumulated awareness through learning.Secondly, students must extend their vocabulary by mastering the multiple expressions of words and understand the meaning and use of words in different contexts.Finally, reading and writing should be taught in combination.The present study has its own limitations and calls for improvement in future related studies.Firstly, the number of samples analyzed may be not large enough to be generalized to all English majors.Secondly, the present study is only carried out in cross-sectional way, so longitudinal study is needed to supplement the results and conclusions of the study.Thirdly, all of the samples are tagged and each matrix is constructed by the researcher herself, so the objectivity of the study still could be impaired.Finally, the reliability could be influenced by the lack of writing scores.