A Study Of Cohesive Devices In Senior Middle School Students’English Writing

As a basic means of communication, writing proves to be one of the hardest skills to acquire, and it has always been under great concern of teachers. Nowadays, this concern seems to have been reinforced by the new writing objectives in the newly promulgated Senior High School English Curriculum Criterion. However, in actual English teaching process, both teachers and students are over-sensitive to grammar, syntactic structure and the spelling of words, while the cohesion of sentences have largely been ignored. Consequently, the idea flow tends to be intermittent, and the main idea is not clear enough to the readers. Therefore, the problem of how to improve the quality of the composition written by senior middle school students under the guide of the theory of cohesion deserves further exploration.According to Halliday and Hasan (1976), cohesion is the foundation of coherence which is the most important prerequisite for the text. It is therefore of great significance to explore the relationship between the quality of writing and the cohesive devices used. This study is such an attempt. It intends to answer the following three questions:1) What is the distribution of different cohesive devices in the argumentative compositions of senior middle school students?2) Are there any differences between high quality compositions and low quality compositions in relation to cohesive devices used in their writings? If yes, what are they?3) What is the relationship between the cohesive devices used in the compositions and the quality of the writing compositions?The subjects of this study are89compositions written by senior one students in the Senior Middle School Attached to Yangzhou University. Firstly, all the compositions will be tagged according to the coding system of cohesion items introduced by Halliday and Hasan (1976). Secondly, all the89compositions are marked according to the writing criteria of NMET independently, and then are divided into HG and LG. At last, the dates will be analyzed through the statistics program Statistics Package for Social Science (SPSS17.0).The major findings include:students in senior middle school use reference most frequently, followed by lexical devices, and conjunctions. There are significant differences between HG and LG in using cohesive devices, and means of reference, conjunctions and lexical devices in HG are much higher than those in LG. Lexical devices and conjunctions have a positive significant correlation with the quality of writing.These findings are of great pedagogical significance. It is advisable for teachers to include cohesive devices in the process of teaching English writing. They should introduce to the students the theory of cohesion and help them build the concept of cohesion, explain to them these devices in detail, help them avoid negative transfer, and learn to think and write in English smoothly.Due to various constraints, this study could not avoid limitations. For example, the size of the samples is small. Therefore, it is not so representative to all the senior middle school students. It is hoped that this paper may shed light on any further research about the integration of cohesion theory and English writing.