Analysis Of Cohesive Ties Between Two Groups Of High School Students' Compositions

English writing plays an important role in English study. English writing ability has beenregarded as an important skill in English teaching. Many scholars home and abroad have studiedthe relationship between cohesion and English writing but mostly restricted to students in thecollege level.This study mainly investigated the use of cohesive ties in the compositions written by highschool students who are participating in a composition contest test organized by Capital NormalUniversity and Beijing Education Commission. Ninety compositions were collected using bothquantitative and qualitative approaches for analyzing the sample. After the assessment 60compositions were selected randomly as a sample and divided into two groups (G group for highscoredcompositions and P group for low-scored compositions) for statistical analysisThis thesis tries to make an analysis of cohesive devices in the English writing of seniorhigh school students. According to the taxonomy by Halliday and Hason (2001), the current thesisattempts to analyze the cohesive devices used in senior high school students'writings.This research proposes three questions:1. How frequently are cohesive devices used in the sample compositions?2. What is the relationship between the frequency of the cohesive devices and the quality of acomposition?3. What are the distinctive features in the students'compositions?Based on this framework the number of cohesive ties used in the sampled students'compositions were calculated and identified. And correlations between the frequency of cohesivedevices and writing quality are also conducted to get the statistical analyses of the relationship andalso some distinctive features in the distribution of the students'compositions. It was found thatthe frequency of total number of cohesive devices, conjunctions, lexical cohesion was adopted ahigher number in high-scored group while less used by the low-scored group. It was also found that there is a significant correlation between the total number of cohesive devices, conjunctions andlexical cohesion and the quality of writing.The findings suggest that it is necessary to introduce students some basic concept of cohesion,coherence and enforce the awareness of the usage of cohesive devices in high school students. Theanalysis of the cohesive devices also wants to shed light on the implications for teachers.