Error Analysis Of The Use Of Cohesive Devices In English Writing

Writing is one of the four elementary skills that an English learner should have and is indispensable to the process of teaching English as a foreign language. Writing, as one of the most difficult English skills, has caught great attention of many foreign and domestic English teachers. The most obvious difficulty in English writing is to produce sentences which are grammatically correct and meaningful, not to mention, to have all the sentences logically connected, i.e. coherent for Chinese learners. Cohesion is the basis of coherence and it is the most important prerequisite condition for the text or discourse (Halliday and Hasan,1976:13). Quite a few researchers have examined the role of the theory based on the cohesion theory proposed by Halliday and Hasan, and achieved a certain achievements in teaching students how to write cohesively and coherently. However, most Error Analysis studies have been done primarily on the clausal level and such a situation has led to primary focus of the study on sentence level, rather than text or discourse as a whole (Johns,1984). Therefore, investigation of cohesive devices used by students can help them improve their language competence such as cohesion and coherence and writing skills.The thesis will apply Error Analysis to discourse level in English writing. And the present study is to use a data-based Error Analysis to analyze the compositions of Chinese non-English major college students. Further more, the cohesion theory is used to make quantitative analysis about the cohesive devices and to calculate how many cohesive devices are used and their frequency and even cohesive errors. Later then, the reasons underlying their writing performance are analyzed by a qualitative approach, and the awareness of using the cohesive devices is reinforced through the investigation. Finally, it is expected that error analysis of cohesive devices could have some important pedagogical implications for the English writing for both teachers and students in second language acquisition.