A Research On Cohesive Devices In EFL Writing

As one of the standards for creating a texture, cohesion is a key element that learners should acquire in order to develop textual competence. There have been a great number of empirical studies on cohesive devices in writing, but the results are too mixed to yield consistent conclusions about how the use of cohesive devices indicates learner's proficiency level or the quality of their writings. Meanwhile, several empirical studies conducted in China demonstrate that the employment of cohesive devices is a trouble spot for Chinese ESL learners.Adopting Halliday and Hasan's (1976) cohesion theory as the framework, the present study is designed to investigate the general characteristics of cohesive devices in writings composed by Chinese medical doctoral students. The specific research questions are:(1) to examine the frequencies of cohesive devices and cohesive errors in the sample compositions produced by Chinese medical doctorate students; (2) to probe into the main features of cohesive errors in the compositions and their sources; (3) to investigate the relationships between the frequency of cohesive devices and the overall quality of the sample compositions; (4) to determine whether there are significant differences in the application of cohesive devices between the higher quality group and the lower quality group.The subjects were the first-semester doctoral students of medicine major from the Second Military Medical University in China. By random sampling, a total of sixty compositions were selected from written language corpus built by the Second Military Medical University. Frequencies of cohesive devices were counted and then controlled for length by being transformed into the frequencies per 100 words. In addition, all the compositions were holistically rated based on TOEFL Independent Writing Task Scoring Guide by three independent raters.The analysis of overall distribution of cohesive devices and errors revealed that lexical cohesion was the most extensively used category of cohesive devices in students'writing; reference was the problematic one for its highest percentage of errors followed by lexical cohesion and conjunction. The further elaboration indicated that students had three areas of difficulty in using cohesive devices:a restricted choice of cohesive items, the underuse and the misuse of certain items.The results of Pearson's correlation illustrated that the composition scores were highly correlated with lexical devices among the three main categories of cohesive devices. Conversely, the frequency of reference correlated negatively with the writing score. In addition, the result of lower and insignificant correlation was detected between conjunction and writing quality. Meanwhile, the results also elucidated that positive significant correlation was found between the correctly used cohesive devices and writing scores. On the contrary, there also existed a negative correlation between the frequency of errors and the writing quality. Furthermore, there was no significant relationship found between the total cohesive devices and writing scores.Independent-sample T-test was employed to investigate the differences in the application of cohesive ties between the higher and the lower quality groups. In general, students in higher quality writing group employed more cohesive devices, and commit fewer cohesive errors than those in the lower quality writing group. It also demonstrated that correctly employed cohesive ties are found far more in higher quality writing group than in lower quality writing group. More specifically, students in the lower-scored group employed more reference ties than those in the higher-scored group; conversely, lexical ties were found more in the higher quality group than in the lower quality group. In addition, the two groups showed no significant difference in the use of conjunction.Based on the above findings, some pedagogical implications are put forward at the end.