Cohesion In Chinese English Major Postgraduates' Theses

Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theory has firstly built the systematic foundation of the theory of cohesion. Previous studies have demonstrated that the theory of cohesion is important to both readers and writers'understanding of a text and cohesion is a significant factor of writing with good quality. There exists high correlation between cohesion and writing quality. However, most previous studies aboard have been intended to analyze the writings written by learners at lower grades while most previous studies home have neglected writing of English major postgraduates.The present study, from the view of Halliday and Hasan's definition of cohesion and taxonomy of cohesion, tried to investigate the use of cohesive devices in 120 theses written by Chinese postgraduates majoring in English and 120 journal articles written by advanced English writers, and the comparison between them in the use of cohesive devices.141 variables under the sub-categories of reference and conjunction are listed for further qualitative analysis, where, by means of Range and Wordsmith software, the number of cohesive devices in each group of data is counted. SPSS software is later used to produce statistical results.The results reveal that both Chinese student writers and advanced writers use a variety of cohesive devices. In reference, comparatively, Chinese student writers used more pronominal reference devices and they used less compratives. In conjunction, additive conjunction devices comes the first among the 4 sub-categories of conjunction and it is followed successively by adversative, temporal and causal conjunction devices. Compared to advanced English writers, Chinese student writers only used more causal conjunction devices and they used less all the other 3 kinds of conjunction devices. On the whole, Chinese student writers used less conjunction devices. In addition, there is no significant difference existing between them in the whole use of cohesive devices.It is found that there are significant differences between Chinese student writers and advanced writers in the number of pronominal reference and adversative conjunction used. Comparatively, Chinese student writers also showed overuse and underuse tendency in reference and conjunction. In reference, Chinese student writers overused most pronominals and "different", the word expressing general comparison; they underused "its", "such" and "as many". In conjunction, Chinese English users preferred to using some seemingly simple cohesive items, such as "and", "or", "therefore" and "next", etc and they also overused some "program language", such as "in consequence", "at last", "to sum up" which represents that there is some kind of deeply rooted writing pattern acquired by Chinese students and they are good at synthesizing rather than analyzing. What's more, Chinese student writers underused some other usual and simple items, such as "for example", "nor", "but", "at least", "rather", "yet" which were normally occurring in the texts written by advanced writers. It reveals that Chinese student writers used less exemplification to help expand discussion and they showed great differences from advanced writers when expressing positive and negative opinions. In addition, a comparatively lower frequency of these items and a lack of lexical variety are observed. It can be conclude that, on the whole, in the use of cohesive devices, Chinese postgraduates majoring in English have already reached a much high level; however, in the use of some specific cohesive items, they have a long way to go to reach the proficiency of advanced writers.