A Corpus-based Study On Cohesion In English Speeches By Chinese College Students

Up to now, discourse analysis has gained considerable achievements. Cohesion and coherence are among the most important questions in discourse analysis. Based on Halliday and Hasan's theory of cohesion and coherence, this paper adopts the corpus-based research method to analyze cohesion in English speeches by Chinese college students, focusing particularly on the distribution of various cohesive devices in prepared speeches and impromptu speeches.The data in this research are Chinese college students'speeches, which belongs to typical English public speeches in China. In order to discuss the features of cohesion in the English speech texts, the author carries out the statistic analysis of five major types of cohesive devices:reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion.This dissertation is based on corpuses to analyze discourses. To reach the purpose of investigation, the author adopts college students'speech texts in 2008 "CCTV Cup" National English Speaking Competition' final as the data, and establishes two corpuses of prepared speeches and impromptu speeches respectively. This is a national competition, so all the sub-corpora represent the highest English level of college students in China. Corpus-based research has its obvious advantages, which has advanced means of disposing data and authentic language materials, and thus can avoid the subjectivity and being one-sided.In this paper, the author analyzes how cohesion and coherence are achieved in the English speeches by Chinese college students. Meanwhile, the author also compares the two corpuses to find the differences in cohesion between prepared speeches and impromptu speeches. It is found that four types of cohesion devices are better used in prepared speech among all five types except substitution. In other words, there is still some improvement in cohesion in impromptu speeches. Therefore, corpus-based research on Chinese college students can not only help us understand the discourse better, but also be used in the practice of English learning and teaching.