An Empirical Study On The Use Of Cohesive Ties In Senior High School Students’ English Writing

In comparison with other English skills, English writing is considered as the mostcomplicated and the most difficult to master in a short period of time. For ChineseEnglish learners, the most troublesome problem is how to write a readablecomposition with clear ideas, accurate grammar and smooth coherence. Consequently,second language researchers and English teachers have given top priorities on how toimprove English language learners’ writing ability.Coherence is regarded as one of the important standards in the evaluation ofEnglish writing quality, while the appropriate employment of cohesive ties is a keyelement to ensure coherence of writings. The present study adopts cohesion theoryproposed by Halliday&Hasan (1976) as the theoretical framework, and investigatesfeatures of cohesive ties in60English compositions written by senior high schoolstudents. In this paper, the writer utilizes the quantitative and qualitative analyses todiscover overall distributions of cohesive ties, compare compositions of differentqualities, and reveal frequent cohesion errors so that this paper can shed some light onpedagogical suggestions in the teaching of English writing.The present study finds that senior high school students have tried to usereference, conjunction and lexical cohesion to keep coherence of compositions, but theuse of each cohesive type is monotonous, and cohesion errors often occur. Besides, thecomparisons of the use of each cohesive type, the total number of ties and correctlyused cohesive ties reveal that explicit differences exist among different scoredcompositions. The result obviously indicates that cohesive ties have some positiveeffects on the quality of compositions. Finally, the author proposes some pedagogicalsuggestions on the enhancement of English writing proficiency.