A Comparative Study Of Cohesive Devices In English Writings Between High-proficient Non-English Majors And Low-proficient Ones

Among the four basic language skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing,writing is always treated as the most complicated one and last acquired in Englishlearning. Meantime language study has gradually turned its focus from sentence-levelto text in the research trend of recent thirty years. Under such a background, thisresearch, based on Halliday’s cohesion theory, sets out to investigate the use ofgrammatical and lexical cohesive devices in CET-4writings of non-English majors ofsecond-year students.The present thesis aims to answer the following three research questions: Firstly,it is to reveal that to what extent the general performances of frequency distribution inthe using of cohesive devices are in each high-proficient and low-proficient group.Then it is to show to us to what extent the general use of cohesive devices correlateswith the writing quality (score) and which are the most efficient cohesive devices thatcan contribute to CET-4writing quality. The last it will explain how the exactdifferences of distribution frequency of each cohesive device between high-proficientand low-proficient groups affect the quality of CET-4compositions.According to the standard marking criteria of CET-4writing, the author selectedrespectively60high-proficient and low-proficient compositions out of180sampleswritten by second-year students of different majors in Xi’an Polytechnique University.After detailed discussion and analysis by tagging and calculating the cohesive devicesin the sample compositions, this study finally comes to the conclusion as follows:Firstly, in low-proficient writing samples great number of repetitions of keywords are used, which makes compositions boring, followed by reference andconjunction; while in high-proficient group reference and reiteration are adopted the most, followed by the total number of conjunction.Secondly, taking the high-proficient and low-proficient groups as a whole, eachcohesive device is correlated with the CET-4writing quality except for repetition,among which collocation and types of conjunction contribute the most to the writingquality in both groups.Finally after a comparative study on the differences of the use of each cohesivedevice between the high-proficient group and low-proficient group, the author foundless collocation and conjunction, compared with high-proficient group, are applied inlow-proficient samples, and they are also easily to be misused for the negative transferof mother language. In addition,“it” and “this” are both used more in low-proficientgroup and both are easily to be misused.In conclusion, properly and correctly using of cohesive devices contributes a lotto the quality of CET-4English writing. Hence, it is necessary for both teachers andstudents to improve their awareness to cultivate and adopt cohesive devices in theirEnglish writing class.