A Research On The Employment Of Cohesive Devices In Senior High School Students’ English Writing

With the rapid development of society and culture, English has been more and more important, which has been paid attention to by people. Therefore, it is quite important for us to learn English. English class is treated as a very compulsory class at schools. What’s more, the score of English takes up a large amount of proportion in all kinds of essential examinations. It is known that listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating belong to the five basic language skills. Especially, writing is the most important and difficult part. In the English exams, writing accounts for a high amount of proportion. Therefore, it’s vital to create an excellent English composition. For all the senior high school students, to learn English very well can not only make them acquire satisfying results in college entrance examinations but also be beneficial for their later college study and future work life. Writing ability can reflect a learner’s thinking mode, comprehensive ability, and the ability to express languages. As for our Chinese senior high school students, producing compositions is much more difficult. After seeing their compositions, there are plenty of mistakes in them, for instance, context lacks of logicalness and coherence; the students use the same items more times. All the students and teachers have trouble in dealing with so many mistakes mentioned above. As far as the mistakes are concerned, teachers summarize as well as analyze the problems but they only emphasize the language points again and again. As a result, a lot of new mistakes which they are not able to predict come into being before their eyes.This thesis combines the cohesion theory which is advocated by Halliday with Error Analysis. And 200 sample compositions have been randomly chosen which have been written by students of Grade 3 of Senior High School Department, Linfen No.1 Middle School as the objects to analyze.The research questions are as the following:(1) What are the frequently employed cohesive devices in the sample compositions?(2) What are the problems when students use cohesive devices in their compositions?(3) What are the reasons for the problems?The research purpose is to analyze what the most frequently used cohesive devices are from the compositions. At the same time, it discusses the mistakes made by the students as well as their corresponding reasons.The final results show that students use lexical cohesion and reference most in their compositions and ignore substitution, ellipsis and conjunction. At the same time, the thesis analyzes the specific mistakes which students have made by means of some features of the use of lexical cohesion, reference and conjunction. At last, some reasonable suggestions are come up with to English teachers. It is believed that in the near future students can make great progress in writing by making such efforts.