A Study On The Employment Of Grammatical Cohesive Devices In The Non-English Majors’ Writing

Among the four basic skills, writing skill is a indispensible part of learner’s competence in English, Hence, the teaching and practice of English writing has attracts a lot attention of English teachers and linguistic researchers. When evaluating a piece of writing, coherence is an important factor which is always taken into consideration. Halliday and Hasan pointed out that coherence, to a great degree, depends on cohesion.----he ways in which the components of the surface text are mutually connected within a discourse. Therefore, utilizing the cohesive devices correctly is a key for a smooth and high-quality writing. And conducting research on how cohesive devices are used in non-English majors’writing will improve English writing teaching and promote learners’ competence in writing. According to Halliday and Hasan, cohesive devices fall into two groups: lexical cohesive devices and grammatical cohesive devices. Most of research in recent years focus on the function of lexical cohesive devices; grammatical cohesive devices are less concerned. Therefore, this thesis tries to focus on grammatical cohesive devices, and discuss the function of the four major grammatical cohesive devices in English writing of non-English majors.This research tries to work out the following three questions:1) How frequently are grammatical cohesive devices used respectively, in non-English majors’ compositions?2) What are the respective frequency of the errors of grammatical cohesive devices in non-English majors’compositions? And the possible causes of these errors.3) Is the frequency of the grammatical cohesive devices positively correlated with the quality of English writing?This thesis studies50compositions writing by non-English-majors in grade one. Based on the cohesive theoretical framework proposed by Halliday and Hasan, all the grammatical cohesive devices and cohesive errors are tagged, collected and classified, with the assistance of searching ware----Antconc. And then an analysis on the correlation between the frequency of correctly used grammatical cohesive devices and writing quality are carried out.The study shows that:firstly, grammatical cohesion plays a very important role in non-English majors’writing because it appears so frequently in the sample compositions, with20.82times per compositions. Among the four types of grammatical cohesive devices, reference is the most frequently used; conjunction ranks the second place. While, substitution and ellipsis are least frequently used devices. The high frequency of reference indicates the students’low proficiency in English writing. Secondly, the analysis on the cohesive errors shows that reference is the most problematic grammatical devices in the samples, followed by conjunction. Reference errors mainly belong to three groups:ambiguous reference, inconsistent reference and frequent shift of reference. While the conjunctive errors are mainly constituted by overuse, misuse, incorrect collocation and mixed style. There are three possible causes for these errors:lack of knowledge of cohesion and coherence, low proficiency in vocabulary and negative transfer from Chinese.Thirdly, the statistics show that there is a strong positive relationship between the frequency of grammatical cohesive devices and the scores. The correlation value between the frequency of conjunction and the score is.724, which shows that the frequency of conjunction is highly correlated with the writing quality.Based on the above results, the thesis offer some suggestions for the teaching strategies in college English writing classes:1) teachers should involve cohesion in the assessment and correction of students’writing;2) teachers should teach the cohesive devices systematically and train students with specially designed exercises;3) cohesion should be involved in the assessment and the response to students’writings.To sum up, teachers should pay more attention to the use of grammatical cohesive devices in their teaching strategy, which is quite important for improving students’proficiency in English writing.