Error Analysis Of The Use Of Cohesive Devices In English Writing

English writing is one of the four basic skills that an English learner should have and that is indispensable link to the process of teaching English as a foreign language. Writing, as the most difficult skill among the four English skills—listening, speaking, reading and writing, has attracted the attention of many foreign and domestic English teachers of English, for Chinese learners of English, the obvious difficulty is to produce grammatical and meaningful sentences, and it is even more difficult to make all the sentences logically connected, i.e. coherent. Halliday and Hasan (1976: 13) point out that cohesion is the foundation of coherence and that is the most important prerequisite for the text. Therefore, quite a few researchers have examined the role of this theory and scored a certain achievements in teaching the students how to write; investigation of cohesive devices used by students can help them improve the quality of their writing. Based on the cohesion theory of Halliday and Hasan, EA (Error Analysis) has been done primarily at clausal level. Such a situation has led the sentence, rather than the text as a whole to receive primary focus of study (Johns, 1984).This thesis will apply error analysis to discourse level. The present study is a data-based EA (Error Analysis) of non-English major college students of China in their L2 (Second Language) compositions. We apply the theories of error analysis and cohesion theory, to make quantitative analysis of the cohesive devices and calculate the number of cohesive devices and cohesion errors. And the author will make qualitative analysis, analyze the reasons underlying their performance, and then strengthen the awareness of both teachers and learners in using the cohesive devices. It is expected that error analysis of cohesive devices would have some significant pedagogical implications for the English writing teaching in China.This thesis is composed of five parts. The gist of each chapter is described as follows: The first part is Introduction. It describes the background and the scope of the study.The second part is Literature Review. It represents the theoretical background of the study, including the definition of'cohesion'and'coherence', the description of the relationship between cohesion and discourse coherence, and the detailed introduction of EA theory, with the author's brief comment on the theory at the close of this chapter.The third part is Results and Discussions. It relates to the statistical analysis of the data. It introduces the collecting method, process of the data and the categorization of cohesion devices according to Halliday and Hasan's theory, and then analyzes the cohesion errors, on the basis of EA theory. The results indicate that learners have problems with using personal and demonstrative references, conjunctions, repetition, and general words, which destroy the coherence of text seriously. The error resources include negative transfer of their mother language, overgeneralization, and induction of teaching.The forth part is Suggestions. Basing on the results of the survey as done in Chapter three, the author offers some suggestions on how to teach English writing. In brief, it is advisable and necessary to impart the knowledge related to the cohesive strategies to the students in teaching of composition. And this, the author believes, can be realized. Some suggestions for further study of cohesion problem have been put forward at the end of this chapter.The fifth part is Conclusion. According to the data analysis and the survey, the conclusion is that the cohesion errors hurt the quality of the writing to a serious extent. So far, the non-English majors have not grasped the cohesion theory as they should. Therefore, it is of practical significance to inoculate the students with the related knowledge so as to improve their writing skills in English.The present study reveals that the lexical cohesion is the weakest item for the students because of the highest error proportion among the three cohesion types. That implies the emphasis of the teacher's instruction. In order to raise the students'discourse awareness, this thesis argues that teachers should call their attention to proper use of cohesive devices. It is a matter of importance that cannot be under valued. Since such a research is carried out on a small scale, no wonder that some defects exist. There is still much room for further exploration of the issues in relevance to practice in cohesion.