An Analysis Of Error Correction And Proofreading In Maticulation English Test Based On Cohesion Theory

A great number of linguists at home or abroad have worked on the study of cohesion theory since it was established in1976. Although these linguists have gained many excellent achievements about cohesion theory, few researches have been conducted by means of the application of cohesion theory to EC and proofreading in MET authentic papers. In matriculation English tests, the part of error correction and proofreading has always been the difficult item for senior high school students. This research focuses on the application of cohesion theory to analyzing EC and proofreading in MET and NMET.The thesis focuses on answering three questions. The first one is what the error types in error correction and proofreading of matriculation English tests are, and it also answers which error types belong to cohesion. The second one is counting up the percentage of the errors related to cohesion. The last one is proposing main approaches to improve students’performances when they do error correction and proofreading.The error types of EC and proofreading in MET are analyzed in detail, mainly based on the taxonomy referred in cohesion in English. Error types are classified into two categories: errors related to cohesion and errors in terms of grammatical structure. The data used for analysis in this research is composed of30pieces of EC and proofreading from MET authentic papers from2007to2011. In order to analyze the research materials, both the qualitative and quantitative methods are adopted in this research. The author analyzes these30pieces of EC and proofreading to obtain the statistical result, showing51.9%of errors are related to cohesion and these errors appear in many different forms, whereas49.1%errors are related to grammatical structure. This result shows that errors with regard to cohesion theory play an important role in error correction and proofreading parts of MET and NMET authentic papers, and errors related to grammatical structure should not be neglected. At the end of this thesis, this author provides some valuable suggestions for the EFL learning and teaching according the major findings of this research. However, the author also puts forward some limitations, for the number of pieces of EC and proofreading is not large and there is no experiment in this research.