Analysis Of The Use Of Cohesive Devices In English Writing For Non-english College Students

Writing belongs to one of the five basic skills in English learning. And it is regarded as a difficult one among the five basic skills—listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation. Writing is also indispensable for some important tests such as CET4—6,TEM4—8,TOFEL,IELTS,BEC and so on. Many students can not pass some English tests just because they are poor in writing. Though there are many reasons leading to poor performance in writing, many researches show that the cohesive error is an important factor. According to Halliday and Hasan, cohesion is a necessary though not a sufficient condition for the creation of a text. Halliday and Hasan said that the text is a discourse that is coherent in the following regards: if the text is coherent in the detailed context, it is consistent in register, and then the text itself will be coherent and therefore cohesive (1976: 23). The present research makes an investigation and analysis of cohesive devices used by students to find out the differences between good students and poor students, and those between good students and native speakers.In the study, the data are from compositions of College English Test Band 4 (CET4). Each composition gets a score and each error has been marked clearly. Those above 10 are regarded as good writings and those below 8 are poor writings. The writer chooses 10,000-word-in-all compositions from poor writings randomly. In the same way, the writer chooses about 10,000-word compositions from good writings. As the study tries to find out the differences in terms of the use of cohesive devices in writing between English learners and native speakers, the writer also selects about 10,000-word compositions from American College Compositions (World Affairs Press, 1999) randomly. For the writing convenience, the selected compositions are named poor writings (PW), good writings (GW) and foreign writings (FW) respectively. In the study, both the number of cohesive devices and cohesion errors are calculated. And then the errors in the use of cohesive devices including reference, ellipsis, substitution, conjunction and lexical cohesion are analyzed. And the possible reasons for those errors leading to the differences between good students and poor ones in China are discussed in terms of error analysis in this study. At the same time, the writer also analyzes the gap between good Chinese students and native speakers so that Chinese teachers and students could realize the gap and improve their way of teaching and learning. Through the research on GW, PW and FW, the findings are as follows:First, through the contrastive research on PW and GW, the writer finds out that Chinese students with low English proficiency use personal references too often such as the use of the word we and I leading to the loss of coherence, and the misuse of it leading to the ambiguous referents; although Chinese learners have acquired the common conjunctive words, they are easy to overuse some colloquial conjunctive words like so regardless of the style of writing. The reason may be due to the acquisition sequence; students whose English proficiency are poor often overuse repetition while they underuse synonyms, superordinates and collocation because the width and depth of lexical knowledge of learners is limited, they are short of the knowledge of the use of cohesion devices or they overuse avoidance strategy as they are afraid of making mistakes.Second, through the contrastive research on GW and FW, the writer finds out those Chinese learners overuse we while native speakers tend to use I. The possible reason is the value difference between the West and the East. Chinese adore collectivism while westerners are fond of individualism. Native speakers are more likely to use the third person forms which are inherently cohesive pointed out by Halliday and Hasan than Chinese learners; native speakers tend to use more complex conjunctive words like although, though, therefore, thus and so on than Chinese learners. The reason may be due to the acquisition sequence or that students lack the sense of style; native speakers depend on using different lexical cohesive devices besides repetition.