A Study On Lexical Cohesive Devices In Chinese English Learners' Expository Writing

English writing,as an instrument to convey thoughts and feelings,plays a crucial part in language teaching.One of the most important objectives is to construct texts which are both cohesive and coherent so as to establish effective and successful communication with people.Cohesion can contribute to creating organized texts and conveying comprehensive information,which is quite vital to writing.Lexical cohesion is one of the major types of cohesion,which has become a heated topic in the study of linguistics and discourse analysis.Though scholars(Johnson 1992,Castro 2004,Zhang 2001)home and abroad have made some studies on lexical cohesion in writing,the results differ from each other greatly.Hence,more future studies need to be conducted on the relationship between writing quality and lexical cohesive devices.Based on the analysis above,adopting the lexical cohesion theory of Halliday and Hasan(1976)as well as the classification of lexical cohesion by Hoey(1991)as its theoretical foundation,this study divides lexical cohesive devices into six subtypes including simple repetition,complex repetition,synonymy,antonymy,hyponymy and general word.It aims to find out the general distribution of six sub-types of lexical cohesion used in their writing,to explore the similarities and differences of lexical cohesive devices between the high-quality group and low-quality group,and to find out the relationship of lexical cohesion devices and writing quality.All the samples analyzed in current 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 2.0(SWECCL 2.0).Both quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis have been adopted to analyze the use of lexical cohesive devices between two groups.Office Software is used to describe the general distribution of six subtypes of lexical cohesive devices.Independent-samples T tests are carried out to obtain the statistical difference in the use of lexical cohesive devices between the two groups.Correlations of Pearson and samples analysis are conducted to analyze the relationship between lexical cohesive devices and writing quality.The major results are presented as follows.Firstly,the rank of lexical cohesive devices in Chinese English learners' writing is simple repetition,complex repetition,hyponymy,synonymy,antonymy and general word.Besides,there exists a significant difference in the use of synonymy,hyponymy and general word between two groups,and high-quality group tends to use the devices more in quantity,and more complex and various in quality.Finally,among the six subtypes,synonymy,hyponymy and general word are significantly related to writing quality.By analyzing the use of Chinese English learners' lexical cohesive devices,it is hoped that teachers could be aware of the importance of lexical cohesion.In the future writing teaching,the corresponding instruction and exercises could be added so that English learners could imply them to writing freely and properly.