A Corpus-based Study On The Use Of Cohesive Devices In Chinese English Majors’ Writing

Cohesion occupies a crucial position in the process of writing. It can not only help to create organized texts, but also convey comprehensible information to the reader. There have been a great number of empirical studies on cohesive devices in writing, but it is difficult to draw a consistent conclusion about how the use of cohesive devices indicates the quality of their writings. Meanwhile, several empirical studies conducted in China indicate that there are few researches about cohesive devices related to English majors. Based on these, adopting Halliday and Hasan’s(1976) cohesion theory as the framework, the present study is designed to make a study of the use of cohesive devices in Chinese English majors’ writing.All the samples analyzed in the present study are collected from Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners(WECCL), one of the sub-corpora of Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners(SWECCL 1.0). Adopting the software Ant Conc 3.2.1w and SPSS 13.0, the use of cohesive devices in Chinese English majors’ writing is analyzed in detail. The specific research questions are to find the differences in the use frequency of cohesive devices in the writings of students at different grades, in the writings of students in the high-score group and the low-score group as well as in the writings of different genres.Based on the quantitative analysis of SWECCL 1.0, the major findings are presented as follows. EFL learners from freshmen to seniors have the tendency of using various cohesive devices in their writing. Compared with freshmen and seniors, sophomores and juniors employ less and less substitution and ellipsis. This phenomenon is a good evidence to show that sophomores and juniors adopt less and less oral expression in their composition and the overall quality of their writing is better. For seniors, compared with another three grades, all of the frequency of cohesive devices is the lowest. Cohesive devices and writing quality is positively related and whether the cohesive devices are employed or not have an important effect on the quality of the writings. Among argumentation, exposition and narration, there exist significant differences between each of the two genres.The present study discusses the use of cohesive devices in English majors’ writing in China, which highlights implications for EFL writing pedagogy. During the English writing instruction, teachers should pay close attention to the use of cohesive devices in order to help students to improve their writing ability.