A Study Of The Use Of Cohesive Devices In English Writing Of Rural High School Students

Using cohesive devices correctly has a direct influence on writing quality and it reflects the writers’ ability of learning English. Despite great attention has been put on cohesion by scholars and considerable achievements have been generated in this field, studies on cohesive in senior high school students’ writing, especially, in rural senior high school students’ writing are rather rare. The present study seeks to investigate the use of cohesive devices in rural senior high school students’ writing under the stressful testing environment from the following three questions: 1. What are the general characteristics of cohesive devices between the rural senior high school students’ writing and the Exemplary NMET writing? 2. Compared with the Exemplary NMET writing, what are the differences in the frequency and the distribution of the use of cohesive devices in rural senior high school students’ writing? 3. What are the general problems of the use of cohesive devices in rural senior high school students’ writing? And what are the causes of these problems?In the current thesis, based on Halliday and Hasan’s(1976) taxonomy of cohesive devices from function and distance, 150 compositions are chosen from the writing part of the first term three examination papers taken by senior three students at Jiangwei High School of Xupu County in Huaihua of Hunan Province and 30 Exemplary NMET compositions(2010-2014) are treated as reference to study the use of cohesive devices by rural senior high school students in their writing with the aid of contrastive interlanguage analysis and error analysis. By way of calculating the frequency of cohesive devices and through statistical analysis, the major findings in the present study may be summarized as follows:1. Lexical cohesion enjoys the highest frequency, followed by conjunction, and substitution and ellipsis are used in low frequency in the rural senior high school students’ writing. Of all the subtypes of cohesive devices, repetition is the most frequently employed, which reflects the writing features of rural senior high school students on the one hand and their deficiency of vocabulary on the other. Demonstrative reference is utilized with the frequency similar to that of repetition, which is related to the excessive use of the definite article “the”. With respect to the tie distance, immediate devices are used most frequently, followed by remote, and mediated and mediated-remote devices are seldom employed. This result demonstrates that rural senior high school students tend to extend their ideas between adjacent sentences rather than across successive sentences. Lexical cohesion, remote and mediated-remote devices used most frequently in the exemplary NMET compositions are seldom used in the English writing of the rural senior high school students, which reflects they are low in language ability.2. Independent sample T-test analysis reveals that there are significant differences in frequency and distribution of the use of cohesive devices. With respect to the differences in the frequency of the use of cohesive devices, the exemplary NMET compositions are higher than the rural senior high school students’ writing; and the exemplary NMET compositions are used more lexical devices than the rural senior high school students’ writing. In terms of the differences in the distribution of the use of cohesive devices, lexical cohesion, remote and mediated-remote devices are used most in the exemplary NMET compositions. However, in the rural senior high school students’ compositions, immediate devices are used most frequently, followed by remote, and mediated and mediated-remote devices are seldom employed.3. Compared to the use of cohesive devices by the Exemplary NMET compositions, it is found that rural senior high school students:(1)overuse conjunction and its four subclasses, namely, additive, adversative, causal and temporal conjunctions;(2) underuse reference and its three subtypes, continuatives, lexical cohesion and its three subcategories of repetition, synonym and superordinate;(3)misuse the adversative conjunction “although/though...but” and the causal conjunction “because/as...so”.4. While the “overuse” is mainly attributed to the over-emphasis by the teachers, the overuse by the students, overgeneralization of the rule and negative transfer of mother tongue; the “underuse” results from insufficient instruction, lack of knowledge, low awareness of use, the use of avoidance strategy and the stressful testing environment; and the “misuse” of the adversative conjunction “although/though...but” and the causal conjunction “because/as...so” are primarily affected by the negative transfer of mother tongue.The major findings yields in the present study reveal that cohesive devices are of great significance in the organization of a composition. Therefore, teachers should pay great attention to the instruction of the knowledge of cohesive devices, and make up a large amount of exercises to raise the students’ awareness of correct and appropriate use of cohesive devices. Meanwhile, the students need to have a good command of various uses of cohesive devices, increase their vocabulary and attempt to enhance their writing quality by reading and reciting classic works.