A Corpus-based Contrastive Research On Lexical Cohesions By Chinese And British College Students

English writing is one of vital forms to measure the output abilities of language learners and asignificant standard to inspect their English language proficiency. Lexical cohesion, as the texture of text,plays an important role in the construction of surface coherence and discourse coherence of Englishargumentative writing.Based on Halliday and Hasan’s (1976,1985) theory of lexical cohesion as well as Heoy’s (1991)classifications of lexical cohesion, this thesis focuses on six subtypes of lexical cohesions, namely, simplerepetition, complex repetition, synonym, antonym, hyponym and general word. Written English Corpus ofChinese Learner (WECCL2.0) was adopted as main corpus and The Louvain Corpus of Native EnglishEssays (LOCNESS) as reference corpus. In order to explore the distribution and developmental trend oflexical cohesions of Chinese learners, three specific questions are addressed as follows:(1) What is the distribution of six subtypes of lexical cohesions in WECCL?(2) What are the similarities and differences between LOCNESS and WECCL in terms of sixsubtypes of lexical cohesions?(3) What the across-grade developmental trend of lexical cohesion can be evidenced in WECCL?The research procedures are showed below: Sub-corpus Generator was firstly used to extract thelearners’ corpus with the topic of “computer and technology”, meanwhile the sub-corpora involvingstudents’ composition texts of Grade1-3are generated; then the three subtypes of lexical cohesion(synonym, antonym, hyponym) in learners’ corpus were manually tagged; With the help of AntConc Tooland manual filtering procedure, the other three types of lexical cohesions (simple repetition, complexrepetition and general word) were extracted from learners’ corpus; Finally SPSS tool was used to explorewhether there are significant differences in term of six subtypes of lexical cohesion between secondlanguage learners and native speakers.The present study mainly draws three conclusions:Firstly, the frequency of lexical cohesion used by Chinese English learner from high to low is: simplerepetition, complex repetition, synonym, anonym, hyponym, and general word.Secondly, according to the result of independent sample t-test, there exist significant differences between second language learners and native speakers in usage of simple repetition, synonym andhyponym.Finally, there exist significant difference in complex repetition and general word among differentlanguage proficiency of learners in terms of the developmental trend of lexical cohesions. The frequency ofcomplex repetition and synonym tend to increase with the improvement of language proficiency, while thesimple repetition and general word tend to decrease.In the end, some reasons contributing to the differences in lexical cohesions between L2learners andnative speakers were explored and some suggestions were put forward accordingly.