A Study On The Use Of Cohesive Devices In EFL Writing By English Majors

Cohesive devices refer to specific grammatical or lexical linguistic elements (e.g.words or phrases). The use of them is an important means to achieve cohesion of textsbecause they can be used to mark different relations between sentences or parts of textsso as to make the texts unified. Up till now, a large number of studies probing into the useof cohesive devices in writing have been conducted. However, the sample sizes of mostof the studies are rather small and their findings concerning the tendency in the use ofcohesive devices in writing by subjects with varied English proficiency levels and thepossible correlation between the use of cohesive devices and the writing quality are farfrom the same. At the same time, no study ever investigates the use of cohesive devices insample compositions of EFL writing by subjects of English majors from newundergraduate colleges.Accordingly, this present study aims at examining the use of cohesive devices insample compositions of EFL writing by students of English major from Baise Universitywhich is a newly-upgraded undergraduate university. In this study, the distribution ofcohesive devices in the sample compositions is to be explored; the tendency in the use ofcohesive devices from the freshmen to the senior is to be revealed; and the possiblecorrelation between the use of cohesive devices and the writing scores is to be discussed.The participants of this study are100undergraduate English majors from two grades,namely, the first grade and the fourth grade, with50for each grade. Each randomlyselected participant is asked to write a piece of writing on the same topic “My BestFriend” to make a corpus for the analysis. The cohesion theory of Halliday and Hasan isadopted as the theoretical basis for the analysis. The sample compositions are graded bythree different raters and the cohesive devices in them are identified and counted. Duringthe process, reference, conjunction and lexical cohesion are found to be used frequently.Then the independent samples t-test is conducted to reveal the tendency in the use ofcohesive devices across the two grades. The use of reference, conjunction and lexicalcohesion grows significantly from the first grade to the fourth grade. Lexical cohesion inparticular increases to a much higher proportion. And correlation analysis is carried out to probe into the possible correlation between the number of cohesive devices and thewriting scores of the sample compositions. The result shows that the use of reference,conjunction and lexical cohesion is found to be correlated with the writing quality thoughthe coefficient of correlation is not high.Some findings of this study confirm and support some previous researchesinvestigating cohesive devices in writing, thus provide some empirical evidences toenrich investigations in this field. Besides, the present study indicates that formalinstruction and explicit explanation of cohesive devices from teachers are still needed forthe students.