A Study On Senior High School Students’ Developmental Situation Of Textual Cohesion In English Writing

English writing,a crucial output skill of language,is an important form to judge the English comprehensive competence of senior high school students.Nevertheless,it is a weak point of English teaching in Chinese high schools.Many learners,due to the lack of specialized and systematic guidance,tend to make mistakes of vocabulary,sentence and planning the structure in English writing.Eventually,the English writing levels of most senior high school students can’t reach the requirement of new curriculum and exam syllabus.The application of cohesive devices has a direct connection with text quality,therefore,we need to look into the situation of using cohesive devices in students’ English compositions.On the basis of former researches,the study adopts the theory of textual cohesion made by Halliday and Hasan to investigate the development of textual cohesion applied in senior English writing from five aspects,i.e.,reference,substitution,ellipsis,conjunction and lexical cohesion.The data sources of this research are 93 English compositions written by thirty-one students enrolled in 2014 from the senior department of Zhangzhou No.1 School,Fujian Province.The study which lasts for more than two years employs the method of combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis,applying one-way repeated measures ANOVA as the statistical tool.The research tries to explore a question: what’s the essential development of five textual cohesive devices applied in students’ writings from Senior 1 to Senior 3respectively?The results show that:(1)On using reference and conjunction,there is no significant difference between Senior 1 and Senior 2,but significant difference exists between Senior 2and Senior 3,and the application of them in Senior 3 is slightly higher than that in Senior 2.(2)Students seldom use substitution and ellipsis since substitution and ellipsis mainly appear in dialogues rather than in written expression and that learners haven’t mastered the application of them.(3)On using lexical cohesion,there is no significant difference from Senior 1 to Senior 3.So it is advisable to enhance consciously the text analysis and the practice of applying cohesive devices in English writing teaching of senior high school,especially focusing on lexical cohesion,substitution and ellipsis.